Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

21

“Alys!” Jason Taverner called loudly. No answer. Is it the mescaline? he asked himself. He made his way clumsily from the phonograph toward the door through which Alys had gone. A long hallway, deep-pile wool carpet. At the far end stairs with a black iron railing, leading up to the second floor.

He strode as quickly as possible up the hall, to the stairs, and then, step by step, up the stairs.

The second floor. A foyer, with an antique Hepplewhite table off to one side, piled high with Box magazines. That, weirdly, caught his attention; who, Felix or Alys, or both, read a low-class mass-circulation pornographic magazine like Box? He passed on then, still—because of the mescaline, certainly—seeing small details. The bathroom; that was where he would find her.

“Alys,” he said grimly; perspiration trickled from his forehead down his nose and cheeks; his armpits had become steamy and damp with the emotions cascading through his body. “God damn it,” he said, speaking to her although he could not see her. “There’s no music on those records, no me. They’re fakes. Aren’t they?” Or is it the mescaline? he asked himself. “I’ve got to know!” he said. “Make them play if they’re okay. Is the phonograph broken, is that it? Needle point or stylus or whatever you call them broken off?” It happens, he thought. Maybe it’s riding on the tops of the grooves.

A half-open door; he pushed it wide. A bedroom, with the bed unmade. And on the floor a mattress with a sleeping bag thrown onto it. A little pile of men’s supplies: shaving cream, deodorant, razor, aftershave, comb … a guest, he thought, here before but now gone.

“Is anybody here?” he yelled.

Silence.

Ahead he saw the bathroom; past the partially opened door he caught sight of an amazingly old tub on painted lion’s legs. An antique, he thought, even down to their bathtub. He loped haltingly down the hail, past other doors, to the bathroom; reaching it, he pushed the door aside.

And saw, on the floor, a skeleton.

It wore black shiny pants, leather shirt, chain belt with wrought-iron buckle. The foot bones had cast aside the high-heeled shoes. A few tufts of hair clung to the skull, but outside of that, there remained nothing: the eyes had gone, all the flesh had gone. And the skeleton itself had become yellow.

“God,” Jason said, swaying; he felt his vision fail and his sense of gravity shift: his middle ear fluctuated in its pressures so that the room caromed around him, silently in perpetual ball motion. Like a pourout of Ferris wheel at a child’s circus.

He shut his eyes, hung on to the wall, then, finally, looked again.

She has died, he thought. But when? A hundred thousand years ago? A few minutes ago?

Why has she died? he asked himself.

Is it the mescaline? That I took? Is this real?

It’s real.

Bending, he touched the leather fringed shirt. The leather felt soft and smooth; it hadn’t decayed. Time hadn’t touched her clothing; that meant something but he did not comprehend what. Just her, he thought. Everything else in this house is the same as it was. So it can’t be the mescaline affecting me. But I can’t be sure, he thought.

Downstairs. Get out of here.

He loped erratically back down the hail, still in the process of scrambling to his feet, so that he ran bent over like an ape of some unusual kind. He seized the black iron railing, descended two, three steps at once, stumbled and fell, caught himself and hauled himself back up to a standing position. In his chest his heart labored, and his lungs, overtaxed, inflated and emptied like a bellows.

In an instant he had sped across the living room to the front door—then, for reasons obscure to him but somehow important, he snatched up the two records from the phonograph, stuffed them into their jackets, carried them with him through the front door of the house, out into the bright warm sun of midday.

“Leaving, sir?” the brown-uniformed private cop asked, noticing him standing there, his chest heaving.

“I’m sick,” Jason said.

“Sorry to hear that, sir. Can I get you anything?”

“The keys to the quibble.”

“Miss Buckman usually leaves the keys in the ignition,” the cop said.

“I looked,” Jason said, panting.

The cop said, “I’ll go ask Miss Buckman for you.”

“No,” Jason said, and then thought, But if it’s the mescaline it’s okay. Isn’t it?

“ ‘No’?” the cop said, and all at once his expression changed. “Stay where you are,” he said. “Don’t head toward that quibble.” Spinning, he dashed into the house.

Jason sprinted across the grass, to the asphalt square and the parked quibble. The keys; were they in the ignition? No. Her purse. He seized it and dumped everything out on the seats. A thousand objects, but no keys. And then, crushing him, a hoarse scream.

At the front gate of the house the cop appeared, his face distorted. He stood sideways, reflexively, lifted his gun, held it with both hands, and fired at Jason. But the gun wavered; the cop was trembling too badly.

Crawling out of the far side of the quibble, Jason lurched across the thick moist lawn, toward the nearby oak trees. Again the cop fired. Again he missed. Jason heard him curse; the cop started to run toward him, trying to get closer to him; then all at once the cop spun and sped back into the house.

Jason reached the trees. He crashed through dry underbrush, limbs of bushes snapping as he forced his way through. A high adobe wall … and what had Alys said? Broken bottles cemented on top? He crawled along the base of the wall, fighting the thick underbrush, then abruptly found himself facing a broken wooden door; it hung partially open, and beyond it he saw other houses and a street.

It was not the mescaline, he realized. The cop saw it, too. Her lying there. The ancient skeleton. As if dead all these years.

On the far side of the street a woman, with an armload of packages, was unlocking the door of her flipflap.

Jason made his way across the street, forcing his mind to work, forcing the dregs of the mescaline away. “Miss,” he said, gasping.

Startled, the woman looked up. Young, heavy-set, but with beautiful auburn hair. “Yes?” she said nervously, surveying him.

“I’ve been given a toxic dose of some drug,” Jason said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Will you drive me to a hospital?”

Silence. She continued to stare at him wide-eyed; he said nothing—he merely stood panting, waiting. Yes or no; it had to be one or the other.

The heavy-set girl with the auburn hair said, “I—I’m not a very good driver. I just got my license last week.”

“I’ll drive,” Jason said.

“But I won’t come along.” She backed away, clutching her armload of badly-wrapped brown-paper parcels. Probably she had been on her way to the post office.

“Can I have the keys?” he said; he extended his hand. Waited.

“But you might pass out and then my flipflap—”

“Come with me then,” he said.

She handed him the keys and crept into the rear seat of the flipflap. Jason, his heart pulsing with relief, got in behind the wheel, stuck the key into the ignition, turned the motor on, and, in a moment, sent the flipflap flipflapping up into the sky, at its maximum speed of forty knots an hour. It was, he noted for some odd reason, a very inexpensive model flipflap: a Ford Greyhound. An economy flipflap. And not new.

“Are you in great pain?” the girl asked anxiously; her face, in his rear-view mirror, still showed nervousness, even panic. The situation was too much for her.

“No,” he said.

“What was the drug?”

“They didn’t say.” The mescaline had virtually worn off, now; thank God his six physiology had the strength to combat it: he did not relish the idea of piloting a slow-moving flipflap through the midday Los Angeles traffic while on a hit of mescaline. And, he thought savagely, a big hit. Despite what she said.

She. Alys. Why are the records blank? he asked silently. The records—where were they? He peered about, stricken. Oh. On the seat beside him; automatically he had thrust them in as he himself got into the flipflap. So they’re okay. I can try to play them again on another phonograph.

“The nearest hospital,” the heavy-set girl said, “is St. Martin’s at Thirty-fifth and Webster. It’s small, but I went there to have a wart removed from my hand, and they seemed very conscientious and kind.”

“We’ll go there,” Jason said.

“Are you feeling worse or better?”

“Better,” he said.

“Did you come from the Buckman’s house?”

“Yes.” He nodded.

The girl said, “Is it true that they’re brother and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Buckman? I mean—”

“Twins,” he said.

“I understand that,” the girl said. “But you know, it’s strange; when you see them together it’s as if they’re husband and wife. They kiss and hold hands, and he’s very deferential to her and then sometimes they have terrible fights.” The girl remained silent a moment and then leaning forward said, “My name is Mary Anne Dominic. What is your name?”

“Jason Taverner,” he informed her. Not that it meant anything. After all. After what had seemed for a moment—but then the girl’s voice broke into his thoughts.

“I’m a potter,” she said shyly. “These are pots I’m taking to the post office to mail to stores in northern California, especially to Gump’s in San Francisco and Frazer’s in Berkeley.”

“Do you do good work?” he asked; almost all of his mind, his faculties, remained fixed in time, fixed at the instant he had opened the bathroom door and seen her—it—on the floor. He barely heard Miss Dominic’s voice.

“I try to. But you never know. Anyhow, they sell.”

“You have strong hands,” he said, for want of anything better to say; his words still emerged semi-reflexively, as if he were uttering them with only a fragment of his mind.

“Thank you,” Mary Anne Dominic said.

Silence.

“You passed the hospital,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “It’s back a little way and to the left.” Her original anxiety had now crawled back into her voice. “Are you really going there or is this some—”

“Don’t be scared,” he said, and this time he paid attention to what he said; he used all his ability to make his tone kind and reassuring. “I’m not an escaped student. Nor am I an escapee from a forced-labor camp.” He turned his head and looked directly into her face. “But I am in trouble.”

“Then you didn’t take a toxic drug.” Her voice wavered. It was as if that which she had most feared throughout her whole life had finally overtaken her.

“I’ll land us,” he said. “To make you feel safer. This is far enough for me. Please don’t freak; I won’t hurt you.” But the girl sat rigid and stricken, waiting for—well, neither of them knew.

At an intersection, a busy one, he landed at the curb, quickly opened the door. But then, on impulse, he remained within the flipflap for a moment, turned still in the girl’s direction.

“Please get out,” she quavered. “I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’m really scared. You hear about hunger-crazed students who somehow get through the barricades around the campuses—”

“Listen to me,” he said sharply, breaking into her flow of speech.

“Okay.” She composed herself, hands on her lapful of packages, dutifully—and fearfully—waiting.

Jason said, “You shouldn’t be frightened so easily. Or life is going to be too much for you.”

“I see.” She nodded humbly, listening, paying attention as if she were at a college classroom lecture.

“Are you always afraid of strangers?” he asked her.

“I guess so.” Again she nodded; this time she hung her head as if he had admonished her. And in a fashion he had.

“Fear,” Jason said, “can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “One day about a year ago there was this dreadful pounding on my door, and I ran into the bathroom and locked myself in and pretended I wasn’t there, because I thought somebody was trying to break in … and then later I found out that the woman upstairs had got her hand caught in the drain of her sink—she has one of those Disposall things—and a knife had gotten down into it and she reached her hand down to get it and got caught. And it was her little boy at the door—”

“So you do understand what I mean,” Jason interrupted.

“Yes. I wish I wasn’t that way. I really do. But I still am.”

Jason said, “How old are you?”

“Thirty—two.”

That surprised him; she seemed much younger. Evidently she had not ever really grown up. He felt sympathy for her; how hard it must have been for her to let him take over her ffipflap. And her fears had been correct in one respect: he had not been asking for help for the reason he claimed.

He said to her, “You’re a very nice person.”

“Thank you,” she said dutifully. Humbly.

“See that coffee shop over there?” he said, pointing to a modern, well-patronized cafe. “Let’s go over there. I want to talk to you.” I have to talk to someone, anyone, he thought, or six or not I am going to lose my mind.

“But,” she protested anxiously, “I have to get my packages into the post office before two so they’ll get the midafternoon pickup for the Bay Area.”

“We’ll do that first, then,” he said. Reaching for the ignition switch, he pulled out the key, handed it back to Mary Anne Dominic. “You drive. As slowly as you want.”

“Mr.—Taverner,” she said. “I just want to be let alone.”

“No,” he said. “You shouldn’t be alone. It’s killing you; it’s undermining you. All the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people.”

Silence. And then Mary Anne said, “The post office is at Fbrty-ninth and Fulton. Could you drive? I’m sort of nervous.”

It seemed to him a great moral victory; he felt pleased. He took back the key, and shortly, they were on their way to Forty-ninth and Fulton.

22

Later, they sat in a booth at a coffee shop, a clean and attractive place with young waitresses and a reasonably loose patronage. The jukebox drummed out Louis Panda’s “Memory of Your Nose.” Jason ordered coffee only; Miss Dominic had a fruit salad and iced tea.

“What are those two records you’re carrying?” she asked.

He handed them to her.

“Why, they’re by you. If you’re Jason Taverner. Are you?”

“Yes.” He was certain of that, at least.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sing,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “I’d love to, but I don’t usually like pop music; I like those great old-time folk singers out of the past, like Buffy St. Marie. There’s nobody now who could sing like Buffy.”

“I agree,” he said somberly, his mind still returning to the house, the bathroom, the escape from the frantic brown-uniformed private cop. It wasn’t the mescaline, he told himself once again. Because the cop saw it, too.

Or saw something.

“Maybe he didn’t see what I saw,” he said aloud. “Maybe he just saw her lying there. Maybe she fell. Maybe—” He thought, Maybe I should go back.

“Who didn’t see what?” Mary Anne Dominic asked, and then flushed bright scarlet. “I didn’t mean to poke into your life; you said you’re in trouble and I can see you have something weighty and heavy on your mind that’s obsessing you.”

“I have to be sure,” he said, “what actually happened. Everything is there in that house.” And on these records, he thought.

Alys Buckman knew about my TV program. She knew about my records. She knew which one was the big hit; she owned it. But—.

There had been no music on the records. Broken stylus, hell—some kind of sound, distorted perhaps, should have come out. He had handled records too long and phonographs too long not to know that.

“You’re a moody person,” Mary Anne Dominic said. From her small cloth purse she had brought a pair of glasses; she now laboriously read the bio material on the back of the record jackets.

“What’s happened to me,” Jason said briefly, “has made me moody.”

“It says here that you have a TV program.”

“Right.” He nodded. “At nine on Tuesday night. On NBC.”

“Then you’re really famous. I’m sitting here talking to a famous person that I ought to know about. How does it make you feel—I mean, my not recognizing who you are when you told me your name?”

He shrugged. And felt ironically amused.

“Would the jukebox have any songs by you?” She pointed to the multicolored Babylonian Gothic structure in the far corner.

“Maybe,” he said. It was a good question.

“I’ll go look.” Miss Dominic fished a half quinque from her pocket, slid from the booth, and crossed the coffee shop to stare down at the titles and artists of the jukebox’s listing.

When she gets back she is going to be less impressed by me, Jason mused. He knew the effect of one ellipsis: unless he manifested himself everywhere, from every radio and phonograph, jukebox and sheet-music shop, TV screen, in the universe, the magic spell collapsed.

She returned smiling.” ‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,’ “she said, reseating herself. He saw then that the half quinque was gone. “It should play next.”

Instantly he was on his feet and across the coffee shop to the jukebox.

She was right. Selection B4. His most recent hit, “Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,” a sentimental number. And already the mechanism of the jukebox had begun to process the disc.

A moment later his voice, mellowed by quad sound points and echo chambers, filled the coffee shop.

Dazed, he returned to the booth.

“You sound superwonderful,” Mary Anne said, politely, perhaps, given her taste, when the disc had ended.

“Thanks.” It had been him, all right. The grooves on that record hadn’t been blank.

“You’re really far out,” Mary Anne said enthusiastically, all smiles and twinkly glasses.

Jason said simply, “I’ve been at it a long time.” She had sounded as if she meant it.

“Do you feel bad that I hadn’t heard of you?”

“No.” He shook his head, still dazed. Certainly she was not alone in that, as the events of the past two days—two days? had it only been that?—had shown.

“Can—I order something more?” Mary Anne asked. She hesitated. “I spent all my money on stamps; I—”

“I’m picking up the tab,” Jason said.

“How do you think the strawberry cheesecake would be?”

“Outstanding,” he said, momentarily amused by her. The woman’s earnestness, her anxieties … does she have any boy friends of any kind? he wondered. Probably not … she lived in a world of pots, clay, brown wrapping paper, troubles with her little old Ford Greyhound, and, in the background, the stereo-only voices of the old-time greats: Judy Collins and Joan Baez.

“Ever listened to Heather Hart?” he asked. Gently.

Her forehead wrinkled. “I—don’t recall for sure. Is she a folk singer or—” Her voice trailed off; she looked sad. As if she sensed that she was failing to be what she ought to be, failing to know what every reasonable person knew. He felt sympathy for her.

“Ballads,” Jason said. “Like what I do.”

“Could we hear your record again?”

He obligingly returned to the jukebox, scheduled it for replay.

This time Mary Anne did not seem to enjoy it.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, “I always tell myself I’m creative; I make pots and like that. But I don’t know if they’re actually any good. I don’t know how to tell. People say to me—”

“People tell you everything. From that you’re worthless to priceless. The worst and the best. You’re always reaching somebody here”—he tapped the salt shaker—“and not reaching somebody there.” He tapped her fruit-salad bowl.

“But there has to be some way—”

“There are experts. You can listen to them, to their theories. They always have theories. They write long articles and discuss your stuff back to the first record you cut nineteen years ago. They compare recordings you don’t even remember having cut. And the TV critics—”

“But to be noticed.” Again, briefly, her eyes shone.

“I’m sorry,” he said, rising to his feet once more. He could wait no longer. “I have to make a phone call. Hopefully I’ll be right back. If I’m not”—he put his hand on her shoulder, on her knitted white sweater, which she had probably made herself—“it’s been nice meeting you.”

Puzzled, she watched him in her wan, obedient way as he elbowed a path to the back of the crowded coffee shop, to the phone booth.

Shut up inside the phone booth, he read off the number of the Los Angeles Police Academy from the emergency listings and, after dropping in his coin, dialed.

“I’d like to speak to Police General Felix Buckman,” he said, and, without surprise, heard his voice shake. Psychologically I’ve had it, he realized. Everything that’s happened … up to the record on the jukebox—it’s too goddamn much for me. I am just plain scared. And disoriented. So maybe, he thought, the mescaline has not worn completely off after all. But I did drive the little flipflap okay; that indicates something. Fucking dope, he thought. You can always tell when it hits you but never when it unhits, if it ever does. It impairs you forever or you think so; you can’t be sure. Maybe it never leaves. And they say, Hey, man, your brain’s burned out, and you say, Maybe so. You can’t be sure and you can’t not be sure. And all because you dropped a cap or one cap too many that somebody said, Hey this’ll get you off.

“This is Miss Beason,” a female voice sounded in his ear. “Mr. Buckman’s assistant. May I help you?”

“Peggy Beason,” he said. He took a deep, unsteady breath and said, “This is Jason Taverner.”

“Oh yes, Mr. Taverner. What did you want? Did you leave anything behind?”

Jason said, “I want to talk to General Buckman.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Buckman—”

“It has to do with Alys,” Jason said.

Silence. And then: “Just a moment please, Mr. Taverner,” Peggy Beason said. “I’ll ring Mr. Buckman and see if he can free himself a moment.”

Clicks. Pause. More silence. Then a line opened.

“Mr. Taverner?” It was not General Buckman. “This is Herbert Maime, Mr. Buckman’s chief of staff. I understand you told Miss Beason that it has to do with Mr. Buckman’s sister, Miss Alys Buckman. Frankly I’d like to ask just what are the circumstances under which you happen to know Miss—”

Jason hung up the phone. And walked sightlessly back to the booth, where Mary Anne Dominic sat eating her strawberry cheesecake.

“You did come back after all,” she said cheerfully.

“How,” he said, “is the cheesecake?”

“A little too rich.” She added, “But good.”

He grimly reseated himself. Well, he had done his best to get through to Felix Buckman. To tell him about Alys. But—what would he have been able to say, after all? The futility of everything, the perpetual impotence of his efforts and intentions … weakened even more, he thought, by what she gave me, that cap of mescaline.

If it had been mescaline.

That presented a new possibility. He had no proof, no evidence, that Alys had actually given him mescaline. It could have been anything. What, for example, was mescaline doing coming from Switzerland? That made no sense; that sounded synthetic, not organic: a product of a lab. Maybe a new multiingredient cultish drug. Or something stolen from police labs.

The record of “Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up.” Suppose the drug had made him hear it. And see the listing on the jukebox. But Mary Anne Dominic had heard it, too; in fact she had discovered it.

But the two blank records. What about them?

As he sat pondering, an adolescent boy in a T-shirt and jeans bent over him and mumbled, “Hey, you’re Jason Taverner, aren’t you?” He extended a ballpoint pen and piece of paper. “Could I have your autograph, sir?”

Behind him a pretty little red-haired teenybopper, bra-less, in white shorts, smiled excitedly and said, “We always catch you on Tuesday night. You’re fantastic. And you look in real life, you look just like on the screen, except that in real life you’re more, you know, tanned.” Her friendly nipples jiggled.

Numbly, by habit, he signed his name. “Thanks, guys,” he said to them; there were four of them in all now.

Chattering to themselves, the four kids departed. Now people in nearby booths were watching Jason and muttering interestedly to one another. As always, he said to himself. This is how it’s been up to the other day. My reality is leaking back. He felt uncontrollably, wildly elated. This was what he knew; this was his life-style. He had lost it for a short time but now—finally, he thought, I’m starting to get it back!

Heather Hart. He thought, I can call her now. And get through to her. She won’t think I’m a twerp fan.

Maybe I only exist so long as I take the drug. That drug, whatever it is, that Alys gave me.

Then my career, he thought, the whole twenty years, is nothing but a retroactive hallucination created by the drug.

What happened, Jason Taverner thought, is that the drug wore off. She—somebody—stopped giving it to me and I woke up to reality, there in that shabby, broken-down hotel room with the cracked mirror and the bug-infested mattress. And I stayed that way until now, until Alys gave me another dose.

He thought, No wonder she knew about me, about my Tuesday-night TV show. Through her drug she created it. And those two record albums—props which she kept to reinforce the hallucination.

Jesus Christ, he thought, is that it?

But, he thought, the money I woke up with in the hotel room, this whole wad of it. Reflexively he tapped his chest, felt its thick existence, still there. If in real life I doled out my days in fleabag hotels in the Watts area, where did I get that money?

And I would have been listed in the police files, and in all the other data banks throughout the world. I wouldn’t be listed as a famous entertainer, but I’d be there as a shabby bum who never amounted to anything, whose only highs came from a pill bottle. For God knows how long. I may have been taking the drug for years.

Alys, he remembered, said I had been to the house before. And apparently, he decided, it’s true. I had. To get my doses of the drug.

Maybe I am only one of a great number of people leading synthetic lives of popularity, money, power, by means of a capsule. While living actually, meanwhile, in bug-infested, ratty old hotel rooms. On skid row. Derelicts, nobodies. Amounting to zero. But, meanwhile, dreaming.

“You certainly are deep in a brown study,” Mary Anne said. She had finished her cheesecake; she looked satiated, now. And happy.

“Listen,” he said hoarsely. “Is my record really in that jukebox?”

Her eyes widened as she tried to understand. “How do you mean? We listened to it. And the little thingy, where it tells the selections, that’s there. Jukeboxes never made mistakes.”

He fished out a coin. “Go play it again. Set it up for three plays.”

Obediently, she surged from her seat, into the aisle, and bustled over to the jukebox, her lovely long hair bouncing against her ample shoulders. Presently he heard it, heard his big hit song. And the people in the booths and at the counter were nodding and smiling at him in recognition; they knew it was he who was singing. His audience.

When the song ended there was a smattering of applause from the patrons of the coffee shop. Grinning reflexively, professionally in return he acknowledged their recognition and approval.

“It’s there,” he said, as the song replayed. Savagely, he clenched his fist, struck the plastic table separating him from Mary Anne Dominic. “God damn it, it’s there.”

With some odd twist of deep, intuitive, female desire to help him Mary Anne said, “And I’m here, too.”

“I’m not in a run-down hotel room, lying on a cot dreaming,” he said huskily.

“No, you’re not.” Her tone was tender, anxious. She clearly felt concern for him. For his alarm.

“Again I’m real,” he said. “But if it could happen once, for two days—” To come and go like this, to fade in and out—“Maybe we should leave,” Mary Anne said apprehensively. That cleared his mind. “Sorry,” he said, wanting to reassure her.

“I just mean that people are listening.”

“It won’t hurt them,” he said. “Let them listen; let them see how you carry your worries and troubles with you even when you’re a world-famous star.” He rose to his feet, however. “Where do you want to go?” he asked her. “To your apartment?” It meant doubling back, but he felt optimistic enough to take the risk.

“My apartment?” she faltered.

“Do you think I’d hurt you?” he said.

Fof an interval she sat nervously pondering. “N-no,” she said at last.

“Do you have a phonograph?” he asked. “At your apartment?”

“Yes, but not a very good one; it’s just stereo. But it works.”

“Okay,” he said, herding her up the aisle toward the cash register. “Let’s go.”

23

Mary Anne Dominic had decorated the walls and ceiling of her apartment herself. Beautiful, strong, rich colors; he gazed about, impressed. And the few art objects in the living room had a powerful beauty about them. Ceramic pieces. He picked up one lovely blue-glaze vase, studied it.

“I made that,” Mary Anne said.

“This vase,” he said, “will be featured on my show.”

Mary Anne gazed at him in wonder.

“I’m going to have this vase with me very soon. In fact”—he could visualize it—“a big production number in which I emerge from the vase singing, like the magic spirit of the vase.” He held the blue vase up high, in one hand, revolving it.” ‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,’ “he said. “And your career is launched.”

“Maybe you should hold it with both hands,” Mary Anne said uneasily.

“‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,’ the song that brought us more recognition—” The vase slid from between his fingers and dropped to the floor. Mary Anne leaped forward, but too late. The vase broke into three pieces and lay there beside Jason’s shoe, rough unglazed edges pale and irregular and without artistic merit.

A long silence passed.

“I think I can fix it,” Mary Anne said.

He could think of nothing to say.

“The most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me,” Mary Anne said, “was one time with my mother. You see, my mother had a progressive kidney ailment called Bright’s disease; she was always going to the hospital for it when I was a kid growing up and she was forever working it into the conversation that she was going to die from it and wouldn’t I be sorry then—as if it was my fault—and I really believed her, that she would die one day. But then I grew up and moved away from home and she still didn’t die. And I sort of forgot about her; I had my own life and things to do. So naturally I forgot about her damn kidney condition. And then one day she came to visit, not here but at the apartment I had before this, and she really bugged me, sitting around narrating all her aches and complaints on and on … I finally said, ‘I’ve got to go shopping for dinner,’ and I split for the store. My mother limped along with me and on the way she laid the news on me that now both her kidneys were so far gone that they would have to be removed and she would be going in for that and so forth and they’d try to install an artificial kidney but it probably wouldn’t work. So she was telling me this, how it really had come now; she really was going to die finally, like she’d always said … and all of a sudden I looked up and realized I was in the supermarket, at the meat counter, and this real nice clerk that I liked was coming over to say hello, and he said, ‘What would you like today, miss?’ and I said, ‘I’d like a kidney pie for dinner.’ It was embarrassing. ‘A great big kidney pie,’ I said, ‘all flaky and tender and steaming and full of nice juices.’ ‘To serve how many?’ he asked. My mother sort of kept staring at me with this creepy look. I really didn’t know how to get out of it once I was in it. Finally I did buy a kidney pie, but I had to go to the delicatessen section; it was in a sealed can, from England. I paid I think four dollars for it. It tasted very good.”

“I’ll pay for the vase,” Jason said. “How much do you want for it?”

Hesitating, she said, “Well, there’s the wholesale price I get when I sell to stores. But I’d have to charge you retail prices because you don’t have a wholesale number, so—”

He got out his money. “Retail,” he said.

“Twenty dollars.”

“I can work you in another way,” he said. “All we need is an angle. How about this—we can show the audience a priceless vase from antiquity, say from fifth-century China, and a museum expert will step out, in uniform, and certify its authenticity. And then you’ll have your wheel there—you’ll make a vase before the audience’s very eyes, and we’ll show them that your vase is better.”

“It wouldn’t be. Early Chinese pottery is—”

“We’ll show them; we’ll make them believe. I know my audience. Those thirty million people take their clue from my reaction; there’ll be a pan up on my face, showing my response.”

In a low voice Mary Anne said, “I can’t go up there on stage with those TV cameras looking at me; I’m so—overweight. People would laugh.”

“The exposure you’ll get. The sales. Museums and stores will know your name, your stuff, buyers will be coming out of the woodwork.”

Mary Anne said quietly, “Leave me alone, please. I’m very happy. I know I’m a good potter; I know that the stores, the good ones, like what I do. Does everything have to be on a great scale with a cast of thousands? Can’t I lead my little life the way I want to?” She glared at him, her voice almost inaudible. “I don’t see what all your exposure and fame have done for you—back at the coffee shop you said to me, ‘Is my record really on that jukebox?’ You were afraid it wasn’t; you were a lot more insecure than I’ll ever be.”

“Speaking of that,” Jason said, “I’d like to play these two records on your phonograph. Before I go.”

“You’d better let me put them on,” Mary Anne said. “My set is tricky.” She took the two albums, and the twenty dollars; Jason stood where he was, by the broken pieces of vase.

As he waited there he heard familiar music. His biggest-selling album. The grooves of the record were no longer blank.

“You can keep the records,” he said. “I’ll be going.” Now, he thought, I have no further need for them; I’ll probably be able to buy them in any record shop.

“It’s not the sort of music I like … I don’t think I’d really be playing them all that much.”

“I’ll leave them anyhow,” he said.

Mary Anne said, “For your twenty dollars I’m giving you another vase. Just a moment.” She hurried off; he heard the noises of paper and labored activity. Presently the girl reappeared, holding another blue-glaze vase. This one had more to it; the intuition came to him that she considered it one of her best.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I’ll wrap it and box it, so it won’t get broken like the other.” She did so, working with feverish intensity mixed with care. “I found it very thrilling,” she said as she presented him with the tied-up box, “to have had lunch with a famous man. I’m extremely glad I met you and I’ll remember it a long time. And I hope your troubles work out; I mean, I hope what’s worrying you turns out okay.”

Jason Taverner reached into his inside coat pocket, brought forth his little initialed leather card case. From it he extracted one of his embossed multicolored business cards and passed it to Mary Anne. “Call me at the studio any time. If you change your mind and want to appear on the program. I’m sure we can fit you in. By the way—this has my private number.”

“Goodbye,” she said, opening the front door for him.

“Goodbye.” He paused, wanting to say more. But there remained nothing to say. “We failed,” he said, then. “We absolutely failed. Both of us.”

She blinked. “How do you mean?”

“Take care of yourself,” he said, and walked out of the apartment, onto the midafternoon sidewalk. Into the hot sun of full day.

24

Kneeling over Alys Buckman’s body, the police coroner said, “I can only tell you at this point that she died from an overdose of a toxic or semitoxic drug. It’ll be twenty-four hours before we can tell what specifically the drug was.”

Felix Buckman said, “It had to happen. Eventually.” He did not, surprisingly, feel very much. In fact, in a way, on some level, he experienced deep relief to have learned from Tim Chancer, their guard, that Alys had been found dead in their second-floor bathroom.

“I thought that guy Taverner did something to her,” Chancer repeated, over and over again, trying to get Buckman’s attention. “He was acting funny; I knew something was wrong. I took a couple of shots at him but he got away. I guess maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get him, if he wasn’t responsible. Or maybe he felt guilty because he got her to take the drug; could that be?”

“No one had to make Alys take a drug,” Buckman said bitingly. He walked from the bathroom, out into the hall. Two gray-clad pols stood at attention, waiting to be told what to do. “She didn’t need Taverner or anyone else to administer it to her.” He felt, now, physically sick. God, he thought. What will the effect be on Barney? That was the bad part. For reasons obscure to him, their child adored his mother. Well, Buckman thought, there’s no accounting for other people’s tastes.

And yet he, himself—he loved her. She had a powerful quality, he reflected. I’ll miss it. She filled up a good deal of space.

And a good part of his life. For better or worse.

White-face, Herb Maime climbed the stairs two steps at a time, peering up at Buckman. “I got here as quickly as I could,” Herb said, holding out his hand to Buckman. They shook. “What was it?” Herb said. He lowered his voice. “An overdose of something?”

“Apparently,” Buckman said.

“I got a call earlier today from Taverner,” Herb said. “He wanted to talk to you; he said it had something to do with Alys.”

Buckman said, “He wanted to tell me about Alys’s death. He was here at the time.”

“Why? How did he know her?”

“I don’t know,” Buckman said. But at the moment it did not seem to matter to him much. He saw no reason to blame Taverner … given Alys’s temperament and habits, she had probably instigated his coming here. Perhaps when Taverner left the academy building she had nailed him, carted him off in her souped-up quibble. To the house. After all, Taverner was a six. And Alys liked sixes. Male and female both.

Especially female.

“They may have been having an orgy,” Buckman said.

“Just the two of them? Or do you mean other people were here?”

“Nobody else was here. Chancer would have known. They may have had a phone orgy; that’s what I meant. She’s come so damn close so many times to burning out her brain with those goddamn phone orgies—I wish we could track down the new sponsors, the ones that took over when we shot Bill and Carol and Fred and Jill. Those degenerates.” His hand shaking, he lit a cigarette, smoking rapidly. “That reminds me of something Alys said one time, unintentionally funny. She was talking about having an orgy and she wondered if she should send out formal invitations. ‘I’d better,’ she said, ‘or everyone won’t come at the same time.’ “ He laughed.

“You’ve told me that before,” Herb said.

“She’s really dead. Cold, stiff dead.” Buckman stubbed out his cigarette in a nearby ashtray. “My wife,” he said to Herb Maime. “She was my wife.”

Herb, with a shake of his head, indicated the two graywrapped pols standing at attention.

“So what?” Buckman said. “Haven’t they read the libretto of Die Walküre?” Tremblingly, he lit another cigarette. “Sigmund and Siglinde. ‘Schwester und Braut.’ Sister and bride. And the hell with Hunding.” He dropped the cigarette to the carpet; standing there, he watched it smolder, starting the wool on fire. And then, with his boot heel, he ground it out.

“You should sit down,” Herb said. “Or lie down. You look terrible.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” Buckman said. “It genuinely is. I disliked a lot about her, but, Christ—how vital she was. She always tried anything new. That’s what killed her, probably some new drug she and her fellow witch friends brewed up in their miserable basement labs. Something with film developer in it or Drano or a lot worse.”

“I think we should talk to Taverner,” Herb said.

“Okay. Pull him in. He’s got that microtrans on him, doesn’t he?”

“Evidently not. All the insects we placed on him as he was leaving the academy building ceased to function. Except, perhaps, for the seed warhead. But we have no reason to activate it.”

Buckman said, “Taverner is a smart bastard. Or else he got help. From someone or ones he’s working with. Don’t bother to try to detonate the seed warhead; it’s undoubtedly been cut out of his pelt by some obliging colleague.” Or by Alys, he conjectured. My helpful sister. Assisting the police at every turn. Nice.

“You’d better leave the house for a while,” Herb said. “While the coroner’s staff does its procedural action.”

“Drive me back to the academy,” Buckman said. “I don’t think I can drive; I’m shaking too bad.” He felt something on his face; putting up his hand, he found that his chin was wet. “What’s this on me?” he said, amazed.

“You’re crying,” Herb said.

“Drive me back to the academy and I’ll wind up what I have to do there before I can turn it over to you,” Buckman said. “And then I want to come back here.” Maybe Taverner did give her something, he said to himself. But Taverner is nothing. She did it. And yet.

“Come on,” Herb said, taking him by the arm and leading him to the staircase.

Buckman, as he descended, said, “Would you ever in Christ’s world have thought you’d see me cry?”

“No,” Herb said. “But it’s understandable. You and she were very close.”

“You could say that,” Buckman said, with sudden savage anger. “God damn her,” he said. “I told her she’d eventually do it. Some of her friends brewed it up for her and made her the guinea pig.”

“Don’t try to do much at the office,” Herb said as they passed through the living room and outside, where their two quibbles sat parked. “Just wind it up enough for me to take over.”

“That’s what I said,” Buckman said. “Nobody listens to me, God damn it.”

Herb thumped him on the back and said nothing; the two men walked across the lawn in silence.

On the ride back to the academy building, Herb, at the wheel of the quibble, said, “There’re cigarettes in my coat.” It was the first thing either of them had said since boarding the quibble.

“Thanks,” Buckman said. He had smoked up his own week’s ration.

“I want to discuss one matter with you,” Herb said. “I wish it could wait but it can’t.”

“Not even until we get to the office?”

Herb said, “There may be other policy-level personnel there when we get back. Or just plain other people—my staff, for instance.”

“Nothing I have to say is—”

“Listen,” Herb said. “About Alys. About your marriage to her. Your sister.”

“My incest,” Buckman said harshly.

“Some of the marshals may know about it. Alys told too many people. You know how she was about it.”

“Proud of it,” Buckman said, lighting a cigarette with difficulty. He still could not get over the fact that he had found himself crying. I really must have loved her, he said to himself. And all I seemed to feel was fear and dislike. And the sexual drive. How many times, he thought, we discussed it before we did it. All the years. “I never told anybody but you,” he said to Herb.

“But Alys.”

“Okay. Well, then possibly some of the marshals know, and if he cares, the Director.”

“The marshals who are opposed to you,” Herb said, “and who know about the”—he hesitated—“the incest—will say that she committed suicide. Out of shame. You can expect that. And they will leak it to the media.”

“You think so?” Buckman said. Yes, he thought, it would make quite a story. Police general’s marriage to his sister, blessed with a secret child hidden away in Florida. The general and his sister posing as husband and wife in Florida, while they’re with the boy. And the boy: product of what must be a deranged genetic heritage.

“What I want you to see,” Herb said, “and I’m afraid you’re going to have to take a look at it now, which isn’t an ideal time with Alys just recently dead and—”

“It’s our coroner,” Buckman said. “We own him, there at the academy.” He did not understand what Herb was getting at. “He’ll say it was an overdose of a semitoxic drug, as he already told us.”

“But taken deliberately,” Herb said. “A suicidal dose.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Herb said, “Compel him—order him—to find an inquest verdict of murder.”

He saw, then. Later, when he had overcome some of his grief, he would have thought of it himself. But Herb Maime was right: it had to be faced now. Even before they got back to the academy building and their staffs.

“So we can say,” Herb said, “that—”

“That elements within the police hierarchy hostile to my campus and labor-camp policies took revenge by murdering my sister,” Buckman said tightly. It froze his blood to find himself thinking of such matters already. But—“Something like that,” Herb said. “No one named specifically. No marshals, I mean. Just suggest that they hired someone to do it. Or ordered some junior officer eager to rise in the ranks to do it. Don’t you agree I’m right? And we must act rapidly; it’s got to be declared immediately. As soon as we get back to the academy you should send a memo to all the marshals and the Director, stating that.”

I must turn a terrible personal tragedy into an advantage, Buckman realized. Capitalize on the accidental death of my own sister. If it was accidental.

“Maybe it’s true,” he said. Possibly Marshal Holbein, for example, who hated him enormously, had arranged it.

“No,” Herb said. “It’s not true. But start an inquiry. And you must find someone to pin it on; there must be a trial.”

“Yes,” he agreed dully. With all the trimmings. Ending in an execution, with many dark hints in media releases that “higher authorities” were involved, but who, because of their positions, could not be touched. And the Director, hopefully, would officially express his sympathy concerning the tragedy, and his hope that the guilty party would be found and punished.

“I’m sorry that I have to bring this up so soon,” Herb said. “But they got you down from marshal to general; if the incest story is publicly believed they might be able to force you to retire. Of course, even if we take the initiative, they may air the incest story. Let’s hope you’re reasonably well covered.”

“I did everything possible,” Buckman said.

“Whom should we pin it on?” Herb asked.

“Marshal Holbein and Marshal Ackers.” His hatred for them was as great as theirs for him: they had, five years ago, slaughtered over ten thousand students at the Stanford Campus, a final bloody—and needless—atrocity of that atrocity of atrocities, the Second Civil War.

Herb said, “I don’t mean who planned it. That’s obvious; as you say, Holbein and Ackers and the others. I mean who actually injected her with the drug.”

“The small fry,” Buckman said. “Some political prisoner in one of the forced-labor camps.” It didn’t really matter. Any one of a million camp inmates, or any student from a dying kibbutz, would do.

“I would say pin it on somebody higher up,” Herb said.

“Why?” Buckman did not follow his thinking. “It’s always done that way; the apparatus always picks an unknown, unimportant—”

“Make it one of her friends. Somebody who could have been her equal. In fact, make it somebody well known. In fact, make it somebody in the acting field here in this area; she was a celebrity-fucker.”

“Why somebody important?”

“To tie Holbein and Ackers in with those gunjy, degenerate phone-orgy bastards she hung out with.” Herb sounded genuinely angry, now; Buckman, startled, glanced at him. “The ones who really killed her. Her cult friends. Pick someone as high as you can. And then you’ll really have something to pin on the marshals. Think of the scandal that’ll make. Holbein part of the phone grid.”

Buckman put out his cigarette and lit another. Meanwhile thinking. What I have to do, he realized, is out-scandal them. My story has to be more lurid than theirs.

It would take some story.

25

In his suite of offices at the Los Angeles Police Academy building, Felix Buckman sorted among the memos, letters, and documents on his desk, mechanically selecting the ones that needed Herb Maime’s attention and discarding those that could wait. He worked rapidly, with no real interest. As he inspected the various papers, Herb, in his own office, began typing out the first informal statement which Buckman would make public concerning the death of his sister.

Both men finished after a brief interval and met in Buckman’s main office, where he kept his crucial activities. At his oversize oak desk.

Seated behind the desk he read over Herb’s first draft. “Do we have to do this?” he said, when he had finished reading it.

“Yes,” Herb said. “If you weren’t so dazed by grief you’d be the first to recognize it. Your being able to see matters of this sort clearly has kept you at policy level; if you hadn’t had that faculty they’d have reduced you to training-school major five years ago.”

“Then release it,” Buckman said. “Wait.” He motioned for Herb to come back. “You quote the coroner. Won’t the media know that the coroner’s investigation couldn’t be completed this soon?”

“I’m backdating the time of death. I’m stipulating that it took place yesterday. For that reason.”

“Is that necessary?”

Herb said simply, “Our statement has to come first. Before theirs. And they won’t wait for the coroner’s inquest to be completed.”

“All right,” Buckman said. “Release it.”

Peggy Beason entered his office, carrying several classified police memoranda and a yellow file. “Mr. Buckman,” she said, “at a time like this I don’t want to bother you, but these—”

“I’ll look at them,” Buckman said. But that’s all, he said to himself. Then I’m going home.

Peggy said, “I knew you were looking for this particular file. So was Inspector McNulty. It just arrived, about ten minutes ago, from Data Central.” She placed the file before him on the blotter of his desk. “The Jason Taverner file.”

Astonished, Buckman said, “But there is no Jason Taverner file.”

“Apparently someone else had it out,” Peggy said. “Anyhow they just put it on the wire, so they must have just now gotten it back. There’s no note of explanation; Data Central merely—”

“Go away and let me look at it,” Buckman said. Quietly, Peggy Beason left his office, closing the door behind her.

“I shouldn’t have talked to her like that,” Buckman said to Herb Maime.

“It’s understandable.”

Opening the Jason Taverner file, Buckman uncovered a glossy eight-by-five publicity still. Clipped to it a memo read: Courtesy of the Jason Taverner Show, nine o’clock Tuesday nights on NBC.

“Jesus God,” Buckman said. The gods, he thought, are playing with us. Pulling off our wings.

Leaning over, Herb looked to see, too. Together, they gazed down at the publicity still, wordlessly, until finally Herb said, “Let’s see what else there is.”

Buckman tossed the eight-by-five photo aside with its memo, read the first page of the file.

“How many viewers?” Herb said.

“Thirty million,” Buckman said. Reaching, he picked up his phone. “Peggy,” he said, “get the NBC-TV outlet here in L.A. KNBC or whatever it is. Put me through to one of the network executives, the higher the better. Tell them it’s us.”

“Yes, Mr. Buckman.”

A moment later a responsible-looking face appeared on the phone screen and in Buckman’s ear a voice said, “Yes, sir. What can we do for you, General?”

“Do you carry the Jason Taverner Show?” Buckman said. “Every Tuesday night for three years. At nine o’clock sharp.”

“You’ve aired it for three years?”

“Yes, General.”

Buckman hung up the phone.

“Then what was Taverner doing in Watts,” Herb Maime said, “buying forged ID cards?”

Buckman said, “We couldn’t even get a birth record on him. We worked every data bank that exists, every newspaper file. Have you ever heard of the Jason Taverner Show on NBC at nine o’clock Tuesday night?”

“No,” Herb said cautiously, hesitating.

“You’re not sure?”

“We’ve talked so much about Taverner—”

“I never heard of it,” Buckman said. “And I watch two hours of TV every night. Between eight and ten.” He turned to the next page of the file, hurling the first page away; it fell to the floor and Herb retrieved it.

On the second page: a list of the recordings that Jason Taverner had made over the years, giving title, stock number, and date. He stared sightlessly at the list; it went back nineteen years.

Herb said, “He did tell us he’s a singer. And one of his ID cards put him in the musicians’ union. So that part is true.”

“It’s all true,” Buckman said harshly. He flipped to page three. It disclosed Jason Taverner’s financial worth, the sources and amounts of his income. “A lot more than I make,” Buckman said, “as a police general. More than you and I make together.”

“He had plenty of money when we had him in here. And he gave Kathy Nelson a hell of a lot of money. Remember?”

“Yes, Kathy told McNulty that; I remember it from McNulty’s report.” Buckman pondered, meanwhile mindlessly dog-earing the edge of the Xerox page. And then ceased. Abruptly.

“What is it?” Herb said.

“This is a Xerox copy. The file at Data Central is never pulled; only copies are sent out.”

Herb said, “But it has to be pulled to be Xeroxed.”

“A period of five seconds,” Buckman said.

“I don’t know,” Herb said. “Don’t ask me to explain it. I don’t know how long it takes.”

“Sure you do. We all do. We’ve watched it done a million times. It goes on all day.”

“Then the computer erred.”

Buckman said, “Okay. He has never had any political affiliations; he’s entirely clean. Good for him.” He leafed further into the file. “Mixed up with the Syndicate for a while. Carried a gun but had a permit for it. Was sued two years ago by a viewer who said a blackout skit was a takeoff on him. Someone named Artemus Franks living in Des Moines. Taverner’s attorneys won.” He read here and there, not searching for anything in particular, just marveling. “His forty-five record, ‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,’ which is his latest, has sold over two million copies. Ever heard of it?”

“I don’t know,” Herb said.

Buckman gazed up at him for a time. “I never heard of it. That’s the difference between you and me, Maime. You’re not sure. I am.”

“You’re right,” Herb said. “But I really don’t know, at this point. I find this very confusing, and we have other business; we have to think about Alys and the coroner’s report. We should talk to him as soon as possible. He’s probably still at the house; I’ll call him and you can—”

“Taverner,” Buckman said, “was with her when she died.”

“Yes, we know that. Chancer said so. You decided it wasn’t important. But I do think just for the record we should haul him in and talk to him. See what he has to say.”

“Could Alys have known him before today?” Buckman said. He thought, Yes, she always liked sixes, especially the ones in the entertainment field. Such as Heather Hart. She and the Hart woman had a three-month romance the year before last … a relationship which I almost failed to hear about: they did a good job of hushing it up. That was one time Alys kept her mouth shut.

He saw, then, in Jason Thverner’s file a mention of Heather Hart; his eyes fixed on it as he thought about her. Heather Hart had been Taverner’s mistress for roughly a year.

“After all,” Buckman said, “both of them are sixes.”

“Taverner and who?”

“Heather Hart. The singer. This file is up to date; it says Heather Hart appeared on Jason Taverner’s show this week. His special guest.” He tossed the file away from him, rummaged in his coat pocket for his cigarettes.

“Here.” Herb extended his own pack.

Buckman rubbed his chin, then said, “Let’s have the Hart woman brought in, too. Along with Taverner.”

“Okay.” Nodding, Herb made a note of that on his customary vest-pocket pad.

“It was Jason Taverner,” Buckman said quietly, as if to himself, “who killed Alys. Jealous over Heather Hart. He found out about their relationship.”

Herb Maime blinked.

“Isn’t that right?” Buckman gazed up at Herb Maime, steadily.

“Okay,” Herb Maime said after a time.

“Motive. Opportunity. A witness: Chancer, who can testify that Taverner came running out apprehensively and tried to get hold of the keys to Alys’s quibble. And then when Chancer went in the house to investigate, his suspicions aroused, Taverner ran off and escaped. With Chancer shooting over his head, telling him to stop.”

Herb nodded. Silently.

“That’s it,” Buckman said.

“Want him picked up right away?”

“As soon as possible.”

“We’ll notify all the checkpoints. Put out an APB. If he’s still in Los Angeles we may be able to catch him with an EEG-gram projection from a copter. A match of patterns, as they’re beginning to do now in New York. In fact we can have a New York police copter brought in just for this.”

Buckman said, “Fine.”

“Will we say that Taverner was involved in her orgies?”

“There were no orgies,” Buckman said.

“Holbein and those with him will—”

“Let them prove it,” Buckman said. “Here in a court in California. Where we have jurisdiction.”

Herb said, “Why Taverner?”

“It has to be somebody,” Buckman said, half to himself; he intertwined his fingers before him on the surface of his great antique oak desk. With his fingers he pressed convulsively, straining with all the force he possessed, one finger against another. “It always, always,” he said, “has to be somebody. And Taverner is somebody important. Just what she liked. In fact that’s why he was there; that’s the celebrity type she preferred. And”—he glanced up—“why not? He’ll do just fine.” Yes, why not? he thought, and continued grimly to press his fingers tighter and tighter together on the desk before him.

26

Walking down the sidewalk, away from Mary Anne’s apartment, Jason Taverner said to himself, My luck has turned. It’s all come back, everything I lost. Thank God!

I’m the happiest man in the whole fucking world, he said to himself. This is the greatest day of my life. He thought, You never appreciate it until you lose it, until all of a sudden you don’t have it any more. Well, for two days I lost it and now it’s back and now I appreciate it.

Clutching the box containing the pot Mary Anne had made, he hurried out into the street to flag down a passing cab.

“Where to, mister?” the cab asked as it slid open its door. Panting with fatigue, he climbed inside, shut the door manually. “803 Norden Lane,” he said, “in Beverly Hills.” Heather Hart’s address. He was going back to her at last. And as he really was, not as she had imagined him during the awful last two days.

The cab zoomed up into the sky and he leaned gratefully back, feeling even more weary than he had at Mary Anne’s apartment. So much had happened. What about Alys Buckman? he wondered. Should I try to get in touch with General Buckman again? But by now he probably knows. And I should keep out of it. A TV and recording star should not get mixed up in lurid matters, he realized. The gutter press, he reflected, is always ready to play it up for all it’s worth.

But I owed her something, he thought. She cut off those electronic devices the pols fastened onto me before I could get out of the Police Academy building.

But they won’t be looking for me now. I have my ID back; I’m known to the entire planet. Thirty million viewers can testify to my physical and legal existence.

I will never have to fear a random checkpoint again, he said to himself, and shut his eyes in dozing sleep.

“Here we are, sir,” the cab said suddenly. His eyes flew open and he sat upright. Already? Glancing out he saw the apartment complex in which Heather had her West Coast hideaway.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, digging into his coat for his roll of paper money. “Thanks.” He paid the cab and it opened its door to let him out. Feeling in a good mood again, he said, “If I didn’t have the fare wouldn’t you open the door?”

The cab did not answer. It had not been programed for that question. But what the hell did he care? He had the money.

He strode up onto the sidewalk, then along the redwood rounds path to the main lobby of the choice ten-story structure that floated, on compressed air jets, a few feet from the ground. The flotation gave its inhabitants a ceaseless sensation of being gently lulled, as if on a giant mother’s bosom. He had always enjoyed that. Back East it had not caught on, but out here on the Coast it enjoyed an expensive vogue.

Pressing the stud for her apartment, he stood holding the cardboard box with its vase on the tips of the upraised fingers of his right hand. I better not, he decided; I might drop it like I did before, with the other one. But I’m not going to drop it; my hands are steady now.

I’ll give the damn vase to Heather, he decided. A present I picked up for her because I understand her consummate taste.

The viewscreen for Heather’s unit lit up and a female face appeared, peering at him. Susie, Heather’s maid.

“Oh, Mr. Taverner,” Susie said, and at once released the latch of the door, operated from within regions of vast security. “Come on in. Heather’s gone out but she—”

“I’ll wait,” he said. He skipped across the foyer to the elevator, punched the up button, waited.

A thoment later Susie stood holding the door of Heather’s unit open for him. Dark-skinned, pretty and small, she greeted him as she always had: with warmth. And—familiarity.

“Hi,” Jason said, and entered.

“As I was telling you,” Susie said, “Heather’s out shopping but she should be back by eight o’clock. Today she has a lot of free time and she told me she wanted to make the best use of it because there’s a big recording session with RCA scheduled for the latter part of the week.”

“I’m not in a hurry,” he said candidly. Going into the living room, he placed the cardboard box on the coffee table, dead center, where Heather would be certain to see it. “I’ll listen to the quad and crash,” he said. “If it’s all right.”

“Don’t you always?” Susie said. “I’ve got to go out, too; I have a dentist’s appointment at four-fifteen and it’s all the way on the other side of Hollywood.”

He put his arm around her and gripped her firm right boob.

“We’re horny today,” Susie said, pleased.

“Let’s get it on,” he said.

“You’re too tall for me,” Susie said, and moved off to resume whatever she had been doing when he rang.

At the phonograph he sorted through a stack of recently played albums. None of them appealed to him, so he bent down and examined the spines of her full collection. From them he took several of her albums and a couple of his own. These he stacked up on the changer and set it into motion. The tone arm descended, and the sound of The Heart of Hart disc, a favorite of his, edged out and echoed through the large living room, with all its drapes beautifully augmenting the natural quad acoust-tones, spotted artfully here and there.

He lay down on the couch, removed his shoes, made himself comfortable. She did a damn good job when she taped this, he said to himself, half out loud. I’m as exhausted as I’ve ever been in my life, he realized. Mescaline does that to me. I could sleep for a week. Maybe I will. To the sound of Heather’s voice and mine. Why haven’t we ever done an album together? he asked himself. A good idea. Would sell. Well. He shut his eyes. Twice the sales, and Al could get us promotion from RCA. But I’m under contract to Reprise. Well, it can be worked out. There’s work in. Everything. But, he thought, it’s worth it.

Eyes shut, he said, “And now the sound of Jason Taverner.” The changer dropped the next disc. Already? he asked himself. He sat up, examined his watch. He had dozed through The Heart of Hart, had barely heard it. Lying back again he once more shut his eyes. Sleep, he thought, to the sound of me. His voice, enhanced by a two-track overlay of guitars and strings, resonated about him.

Darkness. Eyes open, he sat up, knowing that a great deal of time had passed.

Silence. The changer had played the entire stack, hours’ worth. What time was it?

Groping, he found a lamp familiar to him, located the switch, turned it on.

His watch read ten-thirty. Cold and hungry. Where’s Heather? he wondered, fumbling with his shoes. My feet cold and damp and my stomach is empty. Maybe I can—The front door flew open. There stood Heather, in her cheruba coat, holding a copy of the L.A. Times. Her face, stark and gray, confronted him like a death mask.

“What is it?” he said, terrified.

Coming toward him, Heather held out the paper. Silently.

Silently, he took it. Read it.

“Did you kill Alys Buckman?” Heather rasped.

“No,” he said, reading the article.

He ceased reading, crumpled the newspaper savagely.

“Shit,” he said, then. Sucking in his breath he shuddered. Violently.

“It gives her age as thirty-two,” Heather said. “I know for a fact that she’s—was—thirty-four.”

“I saw it,” Jason said. “I was in the house.”

Heather said, “I didn’t know you knew her.”

“I just met her. Today.”

“Today? Just today? I doubt that.”

It’s true. General Buckman interrogated me at the academy building and she stopped me as I was leaving. They had planted a bunch of electronic tracking devices on me, including—”

“They only do that to students,” Heather said.

He finished, “And Alys cut them off. And then she invited me to their house.”

“And she died.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “I saw her body as a withered yellow skeleton and it frightened me; you’re damn right it frightened me. I got out of there as quickly as I could. Wouldn’t you have?”

“Why did you see her as a skeleton? Had you two taken some sort of dope? She always did, so I suppose you did, too.”

“Mescaline,” Jason said. “That’s what she told me, but I don’t think it was.” I wish I knew what it was, he said to himself, his fear still freezing his heart. Is this a hallucination brought on by it, as was the sight of her skeleton? Am I living this or am I in that fleabag hotel room? He thought, Good God, what do I do now?

“You better turn yourself in,” Heather said.

“They can’t pin it on me,” he said. But he knew better. In the last two days he had learned a great deal about the police who ruled their society. Legacy of the Second Civil War, he thought. From pigs to pols. In one easy jump.

“If you didn’t do it they won’t charge you. The pols are fair. It’s not as if the nats are after you.”

He uncrumpled the newspaper, read a little more.

“They give the time of the murder as yesterday,” Heather said. “Where were you yesterday? I called your apartment and didn’t get any answer. And you just now said—”

“It wasn’t yesterday. It was earlier today.” Everything had become uncanny; he felt weightless, as if floating along with the apartment into a bottomless sky of oblivion. “They backdated it. I had a pol lab expert on my show once and after the show he told me how they—”

“Shut up,” Heather said sharply.

He ceased talking. And stood. Helplessly. Waiting.

“There’s something about me in the article,” Heather said, between clenched teeth. “Look on the back page.”

Obediently, he turned to the back page, the continuation of the article.

Jason said, “What kind of relationship did you have with Alys? Knowing her—”

“You said you didn’t know her. You said you just met her today.”

“She was weird. Frankly I think she was a lesbian. Did you and she have a sexual relationship?” He heard his voice rise; he could not control it. “That’s what the article hints at. Isn’t that right?”

Tlie force of her blow stung his face; he retreated involuntarily, holding his hands up defensively. He had never been slapped like that before, he realized. It hurt like hell. His ears rang.

“Okay,” Heather breathed. “Hit me back.”

He drew his arm back, made a fist, then let his arm fall, his fingers relaxing. “I can’t,” he said. “I wish I could. You’re lucky.”

“I guess I am. If you killed her you could certainly kill me. What do you have to lose? They’ll gas you anyhow.”

Jason said, “You don’t believe me. That I didn’t do it.”

“That doesn’t matter. They think you did it. Even if you get off it means the end of your goddamn career, and mine, for that matter. We’re finished; do you understand? Do you realize what you’ve done?” She was screaming at him, now; frightened, he moved toward her, then, as the volume of her voice increased, away again. In confusion.

“If I could talk to General Buckman,” he said, “I might be able to—”

“Her brother? You’re going to appeal to him?” Heather strode at him, her fingers writhing clawlike. “He’s head of the commission investigating the murder. As soon as the coroner reported that it was homicide, General Buckman announced he personally was taking charge of the incident—can’t you manage to read the whole article? I read it ten times on the way back here; I picked it up in Bel Aire after I got my new fall, the one they ordered for me from Belgium. It finally arrived. And now look. What does it matter?”

Reaching, he tried to put his arms around her. Stiffly, she pulled away.

“I’m not going to turn myself in,” he said.

“Do whatever you want.” Her voice had sunk to a blunted whisper. “I don’t care. Just go away. I don’t want to have anything more to do with you. I wish you were both dead, you and her. That skinny bitch—all she ever meant to me was trouble. Finally I had to throw her bodily out; she clung to me like a leech.”

“Was she good in bed?” he said, and drew back as Heather’s hand rose swiftly, fingers groping for his eyes.

For an interval neither of them spoke. They stood close together. Jason could hear her breathing and his own. Rapid, noisy fluctuations of air. In and out, in and out. He shut his eyes.

“You do what you want,” Heather said presently. “I’m going to turn myself in at the academy.”

“They want you, too?” he said.

“Can’t you read the whole article? Can’t you just do that? They want my testimony. As to how you felt about my relationship with Alys. It was public knowledge that you and I were sleeping together then, for Christ’s sake.”

“I didn’t know about your relationship.”

“I’ll tell them that. When”—she hesitated, then went on—“when did you find out?”

“From this newspaper,” he said. “Just now.”

“You didn’t know about it yesterday when she was killed?” At that he gave up; hopeless, he said to himself. Like living in a world made of rubber. Everything bounced. Changed shape as soon as it was touched or even looked at.

“Today, then,” Heather said. “If that’s what you believe. You would know, if anyone would.”

“Goodbye,” he said. Sitting down, he fished his shoes out from beneath the couch, put them on, tied the laces, stood up. Then, reaching, he lifted the cardboard box from the coffee table. “For you,” he said, and tossed it to her. Heather clutched at it; the box struck her on the chest and then fell to the floor.

“What is it?” she asked.

“By now,” he said, “I’ve forgotten.”

Kneeling, Heather picked up the box, opened it, brought forth newspapers and the blue-glazed vase. It had not broken. “Oh,” she said softly. Standing up she inspected it; she held it close to the light. “It’s incredibly beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”

Jason said, “I didn’t kill that woman.”

Wandering away from him, Heather placed the vase on a high ‘shelf of knickknacks. She said nothing.

“What can I do,” he said, “but go?” He waited but still she said nothing. “Can’t you speak?” he demanded.

“Call them,” Heather said. “And tell them you’re here.”

He picked up the phone, dialed the operator.

“I want to put through a call to the Los Angeles Police Academy,” he told the operator. “To General Felix Buckman. Tell him it’s Jason Taverner calling.”

The operator was silent.

“Hello?” he said.

“You can dial that direct, sir.”

“I want you to do it,” Jason said.

“But, sir—”

“Please,” he said.

27

Phil Westerburg, the Los Angeles Police Agency chief deputy coroner, said to General Felix Buckman, his superior, “I can explain the drug best this way. You haven’t heard of it because it isn’t in use yet; she must have ripped it off from the academy’s special-activities lab.” He sketched on a piece of paper. “Time-binding is a function of the brain. It’s a structuralization of perception and orientation.”

“Why did it kill her?” Buckman asked. It was late and his head hurt. He wished the day would end; he wished everyone and everything would go away. “An overdose?” he demanded.

“We have no way of determining as yet what would constitute an overdose with KR-3. It’s currently being tested on detainee volunteers at the San Bernardino forced-labor camp, but so far”—Westerburg continued to sketch—“anyhow, as I was explaining. Time-binding is a function of the brain and goes on as long as the brain is receiving input. Now, we know that the brain can’t function if it can’t bind space as well … but as to why, we don’t know yet. Probably it has to do with the instinct to stabilize reality in such a fashion that sequences can be ordered in terms of beforeand-after–that would be time—and, more importantly, space-occupying, as with a three-dimensional object as compared to, say, a drawing of that object.”

He showed Buckman his sketch. It meant nothing to Buckman; he stared at it blankly and wondered where, this late at night, he could get some Darvon for his headache. Had Alys had any? She had squirreled so many pills.

Westerburg continued, “Now, one aspect of space is that any given unit of space excludes all other given units; if a thing is there it can’t be here. Just as in time if an event comes before, it can’t also come after.”

Buckman said, “Couldn’t this wait until tomorrow? You originally said it would take twenty-four hours to develop a report on the exact toxin involved. Twenty-four hours is satisfactory to me.”

“But you requested that we speed up the analysis,” Westerburg said. “You wanted the autopsy to begin immediately. At two-ten this afternoon, when I was first officially called in.”

“Did I?” Buckman said. Yes, he thought, I did. Before the marshals can get their story together. “Just don’t draw pictures,” he said. “My eyes hurt. Just tell me.”

“The exclusiveness of space, we’ve learned, is only a function of the brain as it handles perception. It regulates data in terms of mutually restrictive space units. Millions of them. Trillions, theoretically, in fact. But in itself, space is not exclusive. In fact, in itself, space does not exist at all.”

“Meaning?”

Westerburg, refraining from sketching, said, “A drug such as KR-3 breaks down the brain’s ability to exclude one unit of space out of another. So here versus there is lost as the brain tries to handle perception. It can’t tell if an object has gone away or if it’s still there. When this occurs the brain can no longer exclude alternative spatial vectors. It opens up the entire range of spatial variation. The brain can no longer tell which objects exist and which are only latent, unspatial possibilities. So as a result, competing spatial corridors are opened, into which the garbled percept system enters, and a whole new universe appears to the brain to be in the process of creation.”

“I see,” Buckman said. But actually he did not either see or care. I only want to go home, he thought. And forget this.

“That’s very important,” Westerburg said earnestly. “KR-3 is a major breakthrough. Anyone affected by it is forced to perceive irreal universes, whether they want to or not. As I said, trillions of possibilities are theoretically all of a sudden real; chance enters and the person’s percept system chooses one possibility out of all those presented to it. It has to choose, because if it didn’t, competing universes would overlap, and the concept of space itself would vanish. Do you follow me?”

Seated a short way off, at his own desk, Herb Maime said, “He means that the brain seizes on the spatial universe nearest at hand.”

“Yes,” Westerburg said. “You’ve read the classified lab report on KR-3, have you, Mr. Maime?”

“I read it a little over an hour ago,” Herb Maime said. “Most of it was too technical for me to grasp. But I did notice that its effects are transitory. The brain finally reestablishes contact with the actual space-time objects that it formerly perceived.”

“Right,” Westerburg said, nodding. “But during the interval in which the drug is active the subject exists, or thinks he exists—”

“There’s no difference,” Herb said, “between the two. That’s the way the drug works; it abolishes that distinction.”

“Technically,” Westerburg said. “But to the subject an actualized environment envelopes him, one which is alien to the former one that he always experienced, and he operates as if he had entered a new world. A world with changed aspects … the amount of change being determined by how great the so-to-speak distance is between the space-time world he formerly perceived and the new one he’s forced to function in.”

“I’m going home,” Buckman said. “I can’t stand any more of this.” He rose to his feet. “Thanks, Westerburg,” he said, automatically extending his hand to the chief deputy coroner. They shook. “Put together an abstract for me,” he said to Herb Maime, “and I’ll look it over in the morning.” He started off, his gray topcoat over his arm. As he always carried it.

“Do you now see what happened to Taverner?” Herb said.

Halting, Buckman said, “No.”

“He passed over to a universe in which he didn’t exist. And we passed over with him because we’re objects of his percept-system. And then when the drug wore off he passed back again. What actually locked him back here was nothing he took or didn’t take but her death. So then of course his file came to us from Data Central.”

“Good night,” Buckman said. He left the office, passed through the great, silent room of spotless metal desks, all alike, all cleared at the end of the day, including McNulty’s, and then at last found himself in the ascent tube, rising to the roof.

The night air, cold and clear, made his head ache terribly; he shut his eyes and gritted his teeth. And then he thought, I could get an analgesic from Phil Westerburg. There’s probably fifty kinds in the academy’s pharmacy, and Westerburg has the keys.

Taking the descent tube he rearrived on the fourteenth floor, returned to his suite of offices, where Westerburg and Herb Maime still sat conferring.

To Buckman, Herb said, “I want to explain one thing I said. About us being objects of his percept system.”

“We’re not,” Buckman said.

Herb said, “We are and we aren’t. Taverner wasn’t the one who took the KR-3. It was Alys. Taverner, like the rest of us, became a datum in your sister’s percept system and got dragged across when she passed into an alternate construct of coordinates. She was very involved with Taverner as a wish-fulfillment performer, evidently, and had run a fantasy number in her head for some time about knowing him as an actual person. But although she did manage to accomplish this by taking the drug, he and we at the same time remained in our own universe. We occupied two space corridors at the same time, one real, one irreal. One is an actuality; one is a latent possibility among many, spatialized temporarily by the KR-3. But just temporarily. For about two days.”

“That’s long enough,” Westerburg said, “to do enormous physical harm to the brain involved. Your sister’s brain, Mr. Buckman, was probably not so much destroyed by toxicity but by a high and sustained overload. We may find that the ultimate cause of death was irreversible injury to cortical tissue, a speed-up of normal neurological decay … her brain so to speak died of old age over an interval of two days.”

“Can I get some Darvon from you?” Buckman said to Westerburg.

“The pharmacy is locked up,” Westerburg said.

“But you have the key.”

Westerburg said, “I’m not supposed to use it when the pharmacist isn’t on duty.”

“Make an exception,” Herb said sharply. “This time.”

Westerburg moved off, sorting among his keys.

“If the pharmacist was there,” Buckman said, after a time, “he wouldn’t need the key.”

“This whole planet,” Herb said, “is run by bureaucrats.” He eyed Buckman. “You’re too sick to take anymore. After he gets you the Darvon, go home.”

“I’m not sick,” Buckman said. “I just don’t feel well.”

“But don’t stick around here. I’ll finish up. You start to leave and then you come back.”

“I’m like an animal,” Buckman said. “Like a laboratory rat.”

The phone on his big oak desk buzzed.

“Is there any chance it’s one of the marshals?” Buckman said. “I can’t talk to them tonight; it’ll have to wait.”

Herb picked up the phone. Listened. Then, cupping his hand over the receiver, he said, “It’s Taverner. Jason Taverner.”

“I’ll talk to him.” Buckman took the phone from Herb Maime, said into it, “Hello, Taverner. It’s late.”

In his ear, Taverner said tinnily, “I want to give myself up. I’m at the apartment of Heather Hart. We’re waiting here together.”

To Herb Maime, Buckman said, “He wants to give himself up.”

“Tell him to come down here,” Herb said.

“Come down here,” Buckman said into the phone. “Why do you want to give up?” he said. “We’ll kill you in the end, you miserable murdering motherfucker; you know that. Why don’t you run?”

“Where?” Taverner squeaked.

“To one of the campuses. Go to Columbia. They’re stabilized; they have food and water for a while.”

Taverner said, “I don’t want to be hunted anymore.”

“To live is to be hunted,” Buckman rasped. “Okay, Taverner,” he said. “Come down here and we’ll book you. Bring the Hart woman with you so we can record her testimony.” You goddamn fool, he thought. Giving yourself up. “Cut your testicles off while you’re at it. You stupid bastard.” His voice shook.

“I want to clear myself,” Taverner’s voice echoed thinly in Buckman’s ear.

“When you show up here,” Buckman said, “I’ll kill you with my own gun. Resisting arrest, you degenerate. Or whatever we want to call it. We’ll call it what we feel like. Anything.” He hung up the phone. “He’s coming down here to be killed,” he said to Herb Maime.

“You picked him. You can unpick him if you want. Clear him. Send him back to his phonograph records and his silly TV show.”

“No.” Buckman shook his head.

Westerburg appeared with two pink capsules and a paper cup of water. “Darvon compound,” he said, presenting them to Buckman.

“Thank you.” Buckman swallowed the pills, drank the water, crushed the paper cup and dropped it into his shredder. Quietly, the teeth of the shredder spun, then ceased. Silence.

“Go home,” Herb said to him. “Or, better yet, go to a motel, a good downtown motel for the night. Sleep late tomorrow; I’ll handle the marshals when they call.”

“I have to meet Taverner.”

“No you don’t. I’ll book him. Or a desk sergeant can book him. Like any other criminal.”

“Herb,” Buckman said, “I intend to kill the guy, as I said on the phone.” Going to his desk he unlocked the bottom drawer, got out a cedar box, set it on the desk. He opened the box and from it brought forth a single-shot Derringer twenty-two pistol. He loaded it with a hollow-nosed shell, half cocked it, held it with its muzzle pointed at the ceiling. For safety’s sake. Habit.

“Let’s see that,” Herb said.

Buckman handed it to him. “Made by Colt,” he said. “Colt acquired the dies and patents. I forget when.”

“This is a nice gun,” Herb said, weighing it, balancing it in his hand. “A fine handgun.” He gave it back. “But a twenty-two slug is too small. You’d have to get him exactly between the eyes. He’d have to be standing directly in front of you.” He placed his hand on Buckman’s shoulder. “Use a thirty-eight special or a forty-five,” he said. “Okay? Will you do that?”

“You know who owns this gun?” Buckman said. “Alys. She kept it here because she said if she kept it at home she might use it on me sometime during an argument, or late at night when she gets—got—depressed. But it’s not a woman’s gun. Derringer made women’s guns, but this isn’t one of them.”

“Did you get it for her?”

“No,” Buckman said. “She found it in a pawnshop down in the Watts area. Twenty-five bucks she paid for it. Not a bad price, considering its condition.” He glanced up, into Herb’s face. “We really have to kill him. The marshals will crucify me if we don’t hang it on him. And I’ve got to stay at policy level.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Herb said.

“Okay.” Buckman nodded. “I’ll go home.” He placed the pistol back in its box, back on its red-velvet cushion, closed the box, then opened it once more and dumped the twentytwo bullet from the barrel. Herb Maime and Phil Westerburg watched. “The barrel breaks to the side in this model,” Buckman said. “It’s unusual.”

“You better get a black-and-gray to take you home,” Herb said. “The way you feel and with what’s happened you shouldn’t be driving.”

“I can drive,” Buckman said. “I can always drive. What I can’t do properly is kill a man with a twenty-two slug who’s standing directly in front of me. Somebody has to do it for me.”

“Good night,” Herb said quietly.

“Good night.” Buckman left them, made his way through the various offices, the deserted suites and chambers of the academy, once more to the ascent tube. The Darvon had already begun to lessen the pain in his head; he felt grateful for that. Now I can breathe the night air, he thought. Without suffering.

The door of the ascent tube slid open. There stood Jason Taverner. And, with him, an attractive woman. Both of them looked frightened and pale. Two tall, handsome, nervous people. Obviously sixes. Defeated sixes.

“You are under police arrest,” Buckman said. “Here are your rights. Anything you say may be held against you. You have a right to counsel and if you cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed for you. You have a right to be tried by a jury, or you can waive that right and be tried by a judge appointed by the Police Academy of Los Angeles City and County. Do you understand what I have just said?”

“I came here to clear myself,” Jason Taverner said.

“My staff will take your depositions,” Buckman said. “Go into the blue-colored offices over there where you were taken before.” He pointed. “Do you see him in there? The man in the single-breasted suit with the yellow tie?”

“Can I clear myself?” Jason Taverner said. “I admit to being in the house when she died, but I didn’t have anything to do with it. I went upstairs and found her in the bathroom. She was getting some Thorazine for me. To counteract the mescaline she gave me.”

“He saw her as a skeleton,” the woman—evidently Heather Hart—said. “Because of the mescaline. Can’t he get off on the grounds that he was under the influence of a powerful hallucinogenic chemical? Doesn’t that legally clear him? He had no control over what he did, and I didn’t have anything to do with it at all. I didn’t even know she was dead until I read tonight’s paper.”

“In some states it might,” Buckman said.

“But not here,” the woman said wanly. Comprehendingly. Emerging from his office, Herb Maime sized up the situation and declared, “I’ll book him and take their statements, Mr. Buckman. You go ahead on home as we agreed.”

“Thank you,” Buckman said. “Where’s my topcoat?” He glanced around for it. “God, it’s cold,” he said. “They turn the heat off at night,” he explained to Taverner and the Hart woman. “I’m sorry.”

“Good night,” Herb said to him.

Buckman entered the ascent tube and pressed the button that closed the door. He still did not have his topcoat. Maybe I should take a black-and-gray, he said to himself. Get some junior-grade eager cadet type to drive me home, or, like Herb said, go to one of the good downtown motels. Or one of the new soundproof hotels by the airport. But then my quibble would be here and I wouldn’t have it to drive to work tomorrow morning.

The cold air and the darkness of the roof made him wince. Even the Darvon can’t help me, he thought. Not completely. I can still feel it.

He unlocked the door of his quibble, got inside and slammed the door after him. Colder in here than out there, he thought. Jesus. He started up the engine and turned on the heater. Frigid wind blew up at him from the floor vents. He began to shake. I’ll feel better when I can get home, he thought. Looking at his wristwatch, he saw that it was twothirty. No wonder it’s so cold, he thought.

Why did I pick Taverner? he asked himself. Out of a planet of six billion people … this one specific man who never harmed anyone, never did anything except let his file come to the attention of the authorities. That’s it right there, he realized. Jason Taverner let himself come to our attention, and as they say, once come to the authorities’ attention, never completely forgotten.

But I can unpick him, he thought, as Herb pointed out.

No. Again it had to be no. The die was cast from the beginning. Before any of us even laid hands on it. Taverner, he thought, you were doomed from the start. From your first act upward.

We play roles, Buckman thought. We occupy positions, some small, some large. Some ordinary, some strange. Some outlandish and bizarre. Some visible, some dim or not visible at all. Jason Taverner’s role was large and visible at the end, and it was at the end that the decision had to be made. If he could have stayed as he started out: one small man without proper ID cards, living in a ratty, broken-down, slum hotel—if he could have remained that he might have gotten away … or at the very worst wound up in a forced-labor camp. But Taverner did not elect to do that.

Some irrational will within him made him want to appear, to be visible, to be known. All right, Jason Taverner, Buckman thought, you are known, again, as you were once before, but better known now, known in a new way. In a way that serves higher ends—ends you know nothing about, but must accept without understanding. As you go to your grave your mouth will be still open, asking the question, “What did I do?” You will be buried that way: with your mouth still open.

And I could never explain it to you, Buckman thought. Except to say: don’t come to the attention of the authorities. Don’t ever interest us. Don’t make us want to know more about you.

Someday your story, the ritual and shape of your downfall, may be made public, at a remote future time when it no longer matters. When there are no more forced-labor camps and no more campuses surrounded by rings of police carrying rapid-fire submachine guns and wearing gas masks that make them look like great-snouted, huge-eyed root-eaters, some kind of noxious lower animal. Someday there may be a post mortem inquiry and it will be learned that you in fact did no harm—did nothing, actually, but become noticed.

The real, ultimate truth is that despite your fame and your great public following you are expendable, he thought. And I am not. That is the difference between the two of us. Therefore you must go and I remain.

His ship floated on, up into the band of nighttime stars. And to himself he sang quietly, seeking to look ahead, to see forward into time, to the world of his home, of music and thought and love, to books, ornate snuff boxes and rare stamps. To the blotting out, for a moment, of the wind that rushed about him as he drove on, a speck nearly lost in the night.

There is beauty which will never be lost, he declared to himself; I will preserve it; I am one of those who cherishes it. And I abide. And that, in the final analysis, is all that matters.

Tunelessly, he hummed to himself. And felt at last some meager heat as, finally, the standard police model quibble heater mounted below his feet began to function.

Something dripped from his nose onto the fabric of his coat. My God, he thought in horror. I’m crying again. He put up his hand and wiped the greaselike wetness from his eyes. Who for? he asked himself. Alys? For Taverner? The Hart woman? Or for all of them?

No, he thought. It’s a reflex. From fatigue and worry. It doesn’t mean anything. Why does a man cry? he wondered. Not like a woman; not for that. Not for sentiment. A man cries over the loss of something, something alive. A man can cry over a sick animal that he knows won’t make it. The death of a child: a man can cry for that. But not because things are sad.

A man, he thought, cries not for the future or the past but for the present. And what is the present, now? They are booking Jason Taverner back at the Police Academy building and he is telling them his story. Like everyone else, he has an account to give, an offering which makes clear his lack of guilt. Jason Taverner, as I fly this craft, is doing that right now.

Turning the steering wheel, he sent his quibble in a long trajectory that brought it at last into an Immelmann; he made the craft fly back the way it had come, at no increase in speed, nor at any loss. He merely flew in the opposite direction. Back toward the academy.

And yet still he cried. His tears became each moment denser and faster and deeper. I’m going the wrong way, he thought. Herb is right; I have to get away from there. All I can do there now is witness something I can no longer control. I am painted on, like a fresco. Dwelling in only two dimensions. I and Jason Taverner are figures in an old child’s drawing. Lost in dust.

He pressed his foot down on the accelerator and pulled back on the steering wheel of the quibble; it spluttered up, its engine missing and misfiring. The automatic choke is still closed, he said to himself. I should have revved it up for a while. It’s still cold. Once more he changed direction.

Aching, and with fatigue, he at last dropped his home route card into the control turret of the quibble’s guiding section and snapped on the automatic pilot. I should rest, he said to himself. Reaching, he activated the sleep circuit above his head; the mechanism hummed and he shut his eyes.

Sleep, artificially induced, came as always at once. He felt himself spiraling down into it and was glad. But then, almost at once, beyond the control of the sleep circuit, a dream came. Very clearly he did not want the dream. But he could not stop it.

The countryside, brown and dry, in summer, where he had lived as a child. He rode a horse, and approaching him on his left a squad of horses nearing slowly. On the horses rode men in shining robes, each a different color; each wore a pointed helmet that sparkled in the sunlight. The slow, solemn knights passed him and as they traveled by he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.

Felix Buckman let them pass; he did not speak to them and they said nothing to him. Together, they all moved toward the house from which he had come. A man had sealed himself up inside the house, a man alone, Jason Taverner, in the silence and darkness, without windows, by himself from now on into eternity. Sitting, merely existing, inert. Felix Buckman continued on, out into the open countryside. And then he heard from behind him one dreadful single shriek. They had killed Taverner, and seeing them enter, sensing them in the shadows around him, knowing what they intended to do with him, Taverner had shrieked.

Within himself Felix Buckman felt absolute and utter desolate grief. But in the dream he did not go back nor look back. There was nothing that could be done. No one could have stopped the posse of varicolored men in robes; they could not have been said no to. Anyhow, it was over. Taverner was dead.

His heaving, disordered brain managed to spike a relay signal via minute electrodes to the sleep circuit. A voltage breaker clicked open, and a solid, disturbing tone awakened Buckman from his sleep and from his dream.

God, he thought, and shivered. How cold it had become. How empty and alone he felt himself to be.

The great, weeping grief within him, left from the dream, meandered in his breast, still disturbing him. I’ve got to land, he said to himself. See some person. Talk to someone. I can’t stay alone. Just for a second if I could—.

Shutting off the automatic pilot he steered the quibble toward a square of fluorescent light below: an all-night gas station.

A moment later he bumpily landed before the gas pumps of the station, rolling to a stop near another quibble, parked and empty, abandoned. No one in it.

Glare lit up the shape of a middle-aged black man in a topcoat, neat, colorful tie, his face aristocratic, each feature starkly outlined. The black man paced about across the oil-streaked cement, his arms folded, an absent expression on his face. Evidently he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship. The black man was neither impatient nor resigned; he merely existed, in remoteness and isolation and splendor, strong in his body, standing high, seeing nothing because there was nothing he cared to see.

Parking his quibble, Felix Buckman shut off the motor, activated the door latch and lock, stepped stiffly out into the cold of night. He made his way toward the black man.

The black man did not look at him. He kept his distance. He moved about, calmly, distantly. He did not speak.

Into his coat pocket Felix Buckman reached with coldshaken fingers; he found his ballpoint pen, plucked it out, groped in his pockets for a square of paper, any paper, a sheet from a memo pad. Finding it, he placed it on the hood of the black man’s quibble. In the white, stark light of the service station Buckman drew on the paper a heart pierced by an arrow. Trembling with cold he turned toward the black man pacing and extended the piece of drawn-on paper to him.

His eyes bulging briefly, in surprise, the black man grunted, accepted the piece of paper, held it by the light, examining it. Buckman waited. The black man turned the paper over, saw nothing on the back, one again scrutinized the heart with the arrow piercing it. He frowned, shrugged, then handed the paper back to Buckman and wandered on, his arms once again folded, his large back to the police general. The slip of paper fluttered away, lost.

Silently, Felix Buckman returned to his own quibble, lifted open the door, squeezed inside behind the wheel. He turned on the motor, slammed the door, and flew up into the night sky, his ascent warning bulbs winking red before him and behind. They shut automatically off, then, and he droned along the line of the horizon, thinking nothing.

The tears came once again.

All of a sudden he spun the steering wheel; the quibble popped violently, bucked, leveled out laterally on a descending trajectory; moments later he once again glided to a stop in the hard glare beside the parked, empty quibble, the pacing black man, the fuel pumps. Buckman braked to a stop, shut off his engine, stepped creakingly out.

The black man was looking at him.

Buckman walked toward the black man. The black man did not retreat; he stood where he was. Buckman reached him, held out his arms and seized the black man, enfolded him in them, and hugged him. The black man grunted in surprise. And dismay. Neither man said anything. They stood for an instant and then Buckman let the black man go, turned, walked shakingly back to his quibble.

“Wait,” the black man said.

Buckman revolved to face him.

Hesitating, the black man stood shivering and then said, “Do you know how to get to Ventura? Up on air route thirty?” He waited. Buckman said nothing. “It’s fifty or so miles north of here,” the black man said. Still Buckman said nothing. “Do you have a map of this area?” the black man asked.

“No,” Buckman said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll ask the gas station,” the black man said, and smiled a little. Sheepishly. “It was—nice meeting you. What’s your name?” The black man waited a long moment. “Do you want to tell me?”

“I have no name,” Buckman said. “Not right now.” He could not really bear to think of it, at this time.

“Are you an official of some kind? Like a greeter? Or from the L.A. Chamber of Commerce? I’ve had dealings with them and they’re all right.”

“No,” Buckman said. “I’m an individual. Like you.”

“Well, I have a name,” the black man said. He deftly reached into his inner coat pocket, brought out a small stiff card, which he passed to Buckman. “Montgomery L. Hopkins is the handle. Look at the card. Isn’t that a good printing job? I like the letters raised like that. Fifty dollars a thousand it cost me; I got a special price because of an introductory offer not to be repeated.” The card had beautiful great embossed black letters on it. “I manufacture inexpensive biofeedback headphones of the analog type. They sell retail for under a hundred dollars.”

“Come and visit me,” Buckman said.

“Call me,” the black man said. Slowly and firmly, but also a little loudly, he said. “These places, these coin-operated robot gas stations, are downers late at night. Sometime later on we can talk more. Where it’s friendly. I can sympathize and understand how you’re feeling, when it happens that places like this get you on a bummer. A lot of times I get gas on my way home from the factory so I won’t have to stop late. I go out on a lot of night calls for several reasons. Yes, I can tell you’re feeling down at the mouth—you know, depressed. That’s why you handed me that note which I’m afraid I didn’t flash on at the time but do now, and then you wanted to put your arms around me, you know, like you did, like a child would, for a second. I’ve had that sort of inspiration, or rather call it impulse, from time to time during my life. I’m forty-seven now. I understand. You want to not be by yourself late at night, especially when it’s unseasonably chilly like it is right now. Yes, I agree completely, and now you don’t exactly know what to say because you did something suddenly out of irrational impulse without thinking through to the final consequences. But it’s okay; I can dig it. Don’t worry about it one damn bit. You must drop over. You’ll like my house. It’s very mellow. You can meet my wife and our kids. Three in all.”

“I will,” Buckman said. “I’ll keep your card.” He got out his wallet, pushed the card into it. “Thank you.”

“I see that my quibble’s ready,” the black man said. “I was low on oil, too.” He hesitated, started to move away, then returned and held out his hand. Buckman shook it briefly. “Goodbye,” the black man said.

Buckman watched him go; the black man paid the gas station, got into his slightly battered quibble, started it up, and lifted off into the darkness. As he passed above Buckman the black man raised his right hand from the steering wheel and waved in salutation.

Good night, Buckman thought as he silently waved back with cold-bitten fingers. Then he reentered his own quibble, hesitated, feeling numb, waited, then, seeing nothing, slammed his door abruptly and started up his engine. A moment later he had reached the sky.

Flow, my tears, he thought. The first piece of abstract music ever written. John Dowland in his Second Lute Book in 1600. I’ll play it on that big new quad phonograph of mine when I get home. Where it can remind me of Alys and all the rest of them. Where there will be a symphony and a fire and it will all be warm.

I will go get my little boy. Early tomorrow I’ll fly down to Florida and pick up Barney. Have him with me from now on. The two of us together. No matter what the consequences. But now there won’t be any consequences; it’s all over. It’s safe. Forever.

His quibble crept across the night sky. Like some wounded, half-dissolved insect. Carrying him home.