Now Wait for Last Year

FOURTEEN

Nighttime in Tijuana.

He walked aimlessly, scuffing the pavement, passing one after another the neon signs of the narrow boothlike shops, listening to the clamor of the Mexican hucksters and enjoying as he always did the steady motion and ceaseless, nervous honking of wheels and autonomic cabs and old-time turbine surface cars made in the USA, which somehow, in their last decrepitude, had been brought across the border.

'Girl, mister?' A boy no older than eleven seized Eric by the sleeve and hung on, dragging him to a stop. 'My sister, only seven, and never lay with a man in her life; I guarantee before God, you be assuredly first.'

'How much?' Eric asked.

'Ten dollars plus the cost of the room; there must be in name of God a room. The sidewalk makes love into something sordid; you cannot do it here and respect yourself after.'

'There's wisdom in that,' Eric agreed. But he continued on anyhow.

At night the robant peddlars and their enormous, useless, machine-made rugs and baskets, their carts of tamales, customarily vanished; the daytime people of Tijuana disappeared along with the middle-aged American tourists to make way for the night people. Men, hurrying, pushed past him; a girl wearing a crushingly tight skirt and sweater squeezed past him, pressing momentarily against him ... as if, he thought, we had some durable relationship penetrating our two lives and this sudden heat exchange through body contact expressed the deepest possible understanding between the two of us. The girl went on, disappeared. Small tough Mexicans, youths wearing open-throated fur shirts, strode directly at him, their mouths agape as if they were strangling. He carefully stepped from their path.

In a town where everything is legal, he thought, and nothing achieves worth, you are wrenched back into childhood. Placed among your blocks and toys, with all your universe within grasp. The price for license is high: it consists of a forfeit of adulthood. And yet he loved it here. The noise and stirrings represented authentic life. Some people found all this evil; he did not. People who thought that were wrong. The restless, roving banks of males who sought God knew what — they themselves didn't know: their striving was the genuine primal under-urge of protoplasmic material itself. This irritable ceaseless motion had once carried life right out of the sea and onto land; creatures of the land now, they still roamed on, up one street and down another. And he went along with them.

Ahead, a tattoo parlor, modern and efficient, lit by a wall of glowing energy, the proprietor inside with his electric needle that did not touch the skin, only brushed near it as it wove a cat's cradle of design. How about that? Eric asked himself. What could I have etched on me, what motto or picture which would give me comfort in these unusual times of duress? In times when we wait for the 'Starmen to appear and take over. Helpless and frightened, all of us become essentially unmanly.

Entering the tattoo parlor, he seated himself and said, 'Can you write on my chest something like—' He pondered. The proprietor continued with his previous customer, a beefy UN soldier who stared sightlessly ahead. 'I want a picture,' Eric decided.

'Look through the book.' Huge sample-caselike ledger passed to him; he opened at random. Woman with four breasts; each spoke a complete sentence. Not quite it; he turned the page. Rocketship with puffs belching from its tail. No. Reminded him of his 2056 self whom he had failed. I am for the reegs, he decided. Tattoo that on me so the 'Star MPs can find it. And I won't have to make further decisions.

Self-pity, he thought. Or is there such a thing as self-compassion? Not much mentioned, anyhow.

'Made up your mind, buddy?' the proprietor asked him, now finished.

Eric said, 'I want you to write on my chest, "Kathy is dead." Okay? How much will that cost?'

'"Kathy is dead,"' the proprietor said. 'Dead of what?'

'Korsakow's syndrome.'

'You want me to put that too? Kathy is dead from – how you spell it?' The proprietor got pen and paper. 'I want it to be right.'

'Where around here,' Eric said, 'can I find drugs? You know, real drugs?'

'Across the street at the pharmacy. Their specialty, creaker.'

He left the tattoo parlor, crossed against the seething, massive organism of traffic. The pharmacy looked old-fashioned, with displays of foot-ailment models and hernia belts and bottles of cologne. Eric opened the door, manually operated, and walked to the counter in the back.

'Yes sir.' A gray-haired respectable professional-looking man in a white smock, waiting on him.

'JJ-180,' Eric said. He laid a fifty-dollar US bill on the counter. 'Three or four caps.'

'One hundred US.' This was business. With no sentiment.

He added two twenties and two fives. The pharmacist disappeared. When he returned he had a glass vial which he placed close to Eric; he took the bills and rang them up on his antique register. Thanks,' Eric said. Carrying the vial, he left the pharmacy.

He walked until more or less by chance he located the Caesar Hotel. Entering, he approached the desk clerk. It appeared to be the same man who had taken care of him and Deg Dal II earlier in the day. A day, Eric thought, made out of years.

'You remember the reeg I came here with?' he asked the clerk.

The clerk eyed him silently.

'Is he still here?' Eric said. 'Was he really cut to bits by Corning, the 'Star hatchet man in this area? Show me the room. I want the same room.'

'Pay in advance, sir.'

He paid, received the key, took the elevator to the proper floor; he walked down the dark carpeted empty hall to the door of the room, unlocked it, and stepped in, feeling for the light switch.

The room lit up and he saw that there was no sign of anything; the room was simply empty. As if the reeg had gone. Stepped out, perhaps. He was right, Eric decided, when he asked me to take him back to the POW camp; he was on the right track all the time. Knew how it would end.

Standing there, he realized that the room horrified him.

He opened the glass vial, got out one capsule of JJ-180, laid it on the vanity table, and with a dime cut the capsule into three parts. There was water in a pitcher nearby; he swallowed one third of the capsule and then walked to the window to look out and wait.

Night became day. He was still in the room at the Caesar Hotel but it was later; he could not tell how much. Months? Years? The room looked the same but probably it always would; it was eternal and static. He left the room, descended to the lobby, asked for a homeopape at the newsstand next to the reservations desk. The vendor, a plump old Mexican woman, handed him a Los Angeles daily; he examined it and saw that he had gone ahead ten years. The date was June 15, 2065.

So he had been correct as to the amount of JJ-180 needed.

Seating himself in a pay vidphone booth, he inserted a coin and dialed Tijuana Fur & Dye. The time appeared to be about noon.

'Let me speak to Mr Virgil Ackerman.'

'Who is calling, please?'

'Dr Eric Sweetscent.'

'Yes of course, Dr Sweetscent. Just a moment.' The screen became fused over and then Virgil's face, as dry and weathered as ever, basically unchanged, appeared.

'Well I'll be darned! Eric Sweetscent! How the hell are you, kid? Gosh, it's been – what has it been? Three years? Four? How is it at—'

Tell me about Kathy,' he said.

'Pardon?'

Eric said, 'I want to know about my wife. What's her medical condition by now? Where is she?'

'Your ex-wife.'

'All right,' he said reasonably. 'My ex-wife.'

'How would I know, Eric? I haven't seen her since she quit her job here and that was at least – well, you remember – six years ago. Right after we rebuilt. Right after the war.'

Tell me anything that would help me find out about her.'

Virgil pondered. 'Well Christ, Eric; you remember how sick she became. Those psychopathic rages.'

'I don't remember.'

Raising his eyebrows, Virgil said, 'You were the one who signed the commitment papers.'

'You think she's institutionalized now? Still?'

'As you explained it to me it's irreversible brain damage. From those toxic drugs she was taking. So I presume she is. Possibly in San Diego. I think Simon Ild told me that one day, not long ago; you want me to check with him? He said he met somebody who had a friend in a psychiatric hospital north of San Diego and—'

'Check with him.' He waited while the screen showed nothing, while Virgil conferred on the interdepartmental circuit with Simon.

At last the elongated, doleful face of his former inventory control clerk appeared. 'You want to know about Kathy,' Simon said. 'I'll tell you what this fellow told me. He met her in Edmund G. Brown Neuropsychiatric Hospital; he had a nervous breakdown, as you call it.'

'I don't call anything that,' Eric said, 'but go ahead.'

Simon said, 'She couldn't control herself, her rages, those destructive binges where she'd break everything, they were coming every day, sometimes four times a day. They kept her on phenothiazine and it had helped – she told him that herself – but finally no matter how much phenothiazine they gave her it didn't help. Damage to the frontal lobe, I guess. And she had difficulty remembering things properly. And ideas of reference; she thought everyone was against her, trying to hurt her... not grandiose paranoia, of course, but just the never-ending irritability, accusing people as if they were cheating her, holding out on her – she blamed everyone.' He added, 'She still talked about you.'

'Saying what?'

'Blaming you and that psychiatrist – what was his name? – for making her go into the hospital and then not letting her out.'

'Does she have any idea why we did it?' Why we had to do it, he thought.

'She said she loved you, but you wanted to get rid of her so you could marry someone else. And you had sworn, at the time of the divorce, that there wasn't anyone else.'

'Okay,' Eric said. Thanks, Simon.' He cut the connection and then called Edmund G. Brown Neuropsychiatric Hospital in San Diego.

'Edmund G. Brown Neuropsychiatric Hospital.' A rapid, overworked middle-aged female at the hospital switchboard.

'I wish to ask about Mrs Katherine Sweetscent's condition,' Eric said.

'Just a moment, sir.' The woman consulted her records, then switched his call to one of the wards; he found himself facing a younger woman, not in white uniform but in an ordinary flowered cotton dress.

'This is Dr Eric Sweetscent. What can you tell me about Katherine Sweetscent's condition? Is she making any progress?'

'There hasn't been any change since you called last, doctor, two weeks ago. I'll get her file, however.' The woman disappeared from the screen.

Good Lord, Eric thought. I'm still watching over her ten years from now; am I caught in this one way or another the rest of my life?

The ward technician returned. 'You know that Dr Bramel-man is trying the new Gloser-Little unit with Mrs Sweetscent. In order to induce the brain tissue to start repair of itself. But so far—' She leafed through the pages. 'Results have been meager. I would suggest you contact us again in another month or possibly two. There won't be any change before that.'

'But it could work,' he said. This new unit you spoke about.' He had never heard of it; obviously it was a construct of the future. 'I mean, there's still hope.'

'Oh yes, doctor. There's definitely hope.' She said it in such a way as to convey to him that this was merely a philosophical answer; there was hope in every case, as far as she was concerned. So it meant nothing.

'Thank you.' And then he said, 'Check your files, please, and see what it says as to my place of business. I've changed jobs recently so it may be wrong.'

After a pause the ward technician said, 'You're listed as Chief Org-trans Surgeon at Kaiser Foundation in Oakland.'

'That's correct,' Eric said. And rang off.

He obtained the number from information and dialed Kaiser Foundation in Oakland.

'Let me talk to Dr Sweetscent.'

'Who is calling, please?'

That stopped him momentarily. Tell him it's his younger brother.'

'Yes sir. Just a moment, please.'

His face, his older, grayer face, appeared on the screen. 'Hi.'

'Hello,' Eric said. He was not sure what to say. 'Am I bothering you when you're busy?' He did not look bad, ten years from now. Dignified.

'No, go ahead. I've been expecting the call; I remember the approximate date. You just called Edmund G. Brown Neuro-psychiatric Hospital and learned about the Gloser-Little unit. I'll tell you something the ward technician didn't. The Gloser-Little unit constitutes the only brain artiforg they've managed to come up with. It replaces portions of the frontal lobe; once it's installed it stays as long as the person lives, If it helps. To be truthful with you, it should have worked right away.'

'So you don't think it's going to.'

'No,' the older Eric Sweetscent said.

'Do you think if we hadn't divorced her—'

'It would have made no difference. Tests we give now – believe me.'

Then even that wouldn't help, Eric realized. Staying with her, even for the rest of my life. 'I appreciate your help,' he said. 'And I find it interesting – I guess that's the word – that you're still keeping tabs on her.'

'Conscience is conscience. In some respects the divorce put more of a responsibility on us to see about her welfare. Because she got so much worse immediately after.'

'Is there any way out?' Eric asked.

The older Eric Sweetscent, of the year 2065, shook his head.

'Okay,' Eric said. Thanks for being honest with me.'

'Like you yourself say, you should always be honest with yourself.' He added, 'Good luck on the commitment proceedings; they're going to be rough. But that won't come for a while.'

'How about the rest of the war, in particular the takeover of Terra by the 'Starmen?'

The older Eric Sweetscent grinned. 'Hell, you're too bogged down in your own personal trouble to notice. War? What war?'

'So long,' Eric said, and rang off.

He left the vidphone booth. He's got a point, he admitted to himself. If I were rational – but I'm not. The 'Starmen are probably assembling an emergency plan right now, getting ready for the jump-off; I know this and yet I don't feel it, I feel-The need for death, he thought.

Why not? Gino Molinari made his death into an instrument of political strategy; he outwitted his opponents through it and he'll probably do so again. Of course, he realized, that's not what I had in mind. I'm outwitting nobody. Many people will die in this invasion; why not one more? Who loses by it? Who am I close to? He thought, Those future Sweetscents are going to be sore as hell about it but that's just too bad. I don't particularly give a damn about them anyhow. And, except that their existences depend on mine, they feel the same about me. Perhaps, he decided, that's the problem. Not my relationship with Kathy but my relationship with myself.

Passing through the lobby of the Caesar Hotel, he emerged on the daytime, busy Tijuana street of ten years hence.

Sunlight blinded him; he stood blinking and adjusting. The surface vehicles, even here, had changed. Sleeker, more attractive. The street, now, was adequately paved. There came the tamale vendors and the rug vendors except that now they were not robants; they were, he saw with a start, reegs. Evidently they had entered Terran society at the bottom rung, would have to work their way to the equality he had witnessed a century from his own time, ninety years from now. It did not seem fair to him, but there it was.

Hands in his pockets, he walked with the surging crowd that inhabited the sidewalks of Tijuana throughout all the ages, until he arrived at the pharmacy at which he had bought the capsules of JJ-180. As always it was open for business. It, too, had not altered in a decade, except that now the hernia belt display had gone. In its place he saw a contrivance unfamiliar to him. Halting, he examined the Spanish sign propped behind it. The thing evidently increased one's sexual potency, he decided. Permitted – as he translated the Spanish – an infinitude of orgasms, one immediately following the other. Amused, he continued on inside the pharmacy, to the counter in the rear.

A different pharmacist, this one a black-haired elderly female, greeted him. 'Sí?' She leered, showing cheap chromium teeth.

Eric said, 'You have a West German product, g-Totex blau?'

'I look. You wait, okay?' The woman trudged off and disappeared among the pharmaceuticals. Eric wandered around the displays sightlessly. 'G-Totex blau a terrible poison,' the old woman called to him. 'You have to sign the book for it; sí?'

'Sí,' Eric said.

The product, in its black carton, was laid on the counter before him. Two dollars fifty US,' the old woman said. She lugged the control book out, put it where he could reach it with the chained pen. As he signed she wrapped the black carton. 'You going to kill yourself, señor?' she asked acutely. 'Yes, I can tell. This will not hurt with this product; I have seen it. No pain, just no heart all of a sudden.'

'Yes,' he agreed. 'It's a good product.'

'From A. G. Chemie. Reliable.' She beamed in what seemed approval.

He paid the money – his ten-year-old bills were accepted without comment – and left the pharmacy with his package. Weird, he thought, in Tijuana it's still as it was. Always will be. Nobody even cares if you destroy yourself; it's a wonder they don't have booths at night where it's done for you, at ten pesos. Perhaps there is by now.

It shook him a little, the woman's evident approval – and she did not know anything about him, even who he was. The war did it, he said to himself. I don't know why I let it surprise me.

When he returned to the Caesar Hotel and started upstairsJo his room, the desk clerk – unfamiliar to him – halted him. 'Sir, you are not a resident here.' The clerk had moved swiftly from behind the counter to bar his way. 'Did you want a room?'

'I have one,' Eric said, and then remembered it had been ten years in the past; his occupancy had lapsed long ago.

'Nine U S dollars each night in advance,' the desk clerk said. 'Since you do not have luggage.'

Eric got out his wallet, passed over a ten-dollar bill. The clerk, however, inspected the bill with professional disavowal and mounting suspicion.

'These were called in,' the clerk informed him. 'Hard to exchange now because no more legal.' He raised his head and scrutinized Eric with defiance. Twenty. Two tens. And maybe even then I not accept them.' He waited, devoid of enthusiasm; he clearly resented being paid in currency of this kind. It probably reminded him of the old days, the bad times of the war.

He had only one more bill in his wallet and that was a five. And, incredibly, through some freakish foul-up, perhaps because he had traded his watch for them, the useless currency from ninety years in the future; he spread them on the counter, their intricate, multi-colored scroll-work shimmering. So perhaps, he thought, Kathy's electronic part had reached Virgil Ackerman back in the mid thirties after all; at least it had a chance. That cheered him.

The clerk picked up one of the 2155 bills. 'What is this?' He held it to the light. 'I never see before. You make it yourself?'

'No,' Eric said.

'I can't use,' the clerk decided. 'Go before I call the police; you make it yourself, I know.' He tossed the bill back with the others in a gesture of repugnance. 'Funny money. Go away.'

Leaving the 2155 bills on the counter but retrieving the five, Eric turned and walked out the door of the hotel, his package of g-Totex blau under his arm.

There were many malformed little alleys in Tijuana, even now after the war; he found a narrow, dark passage between brick buildings, littered with debris and the overflow from two immense ashcans that had once been oil drums. In the alley he seated himself on the wooden step by a boarded-up entrance, lit a cigarette, sat smoking and pondering. He could not be seen from the street; the people rushing by on the sidewalk paid no attention to him and he focused his attention by watching them, in particular the girls. This, too, was as he knew it in the previous decade. A girl during daylight hours on the streets of Tijuana dressed with incomprehensible smartness: high heels, angora sweater, shiny purse, gloves, coat over her shoulders, preceded, as she hurried, by high, sharp-as-tacks breasts, the smartness carrying even to the detail of her modern bra. What did these girls do for a living? Where had they learned to dress so well, not to mention the problem of financing such a wardrobe? He had wondered this in his own time and he wondered it now.

The answer, he speculated, would be to stop one of these daytime Tijuana girls in flight, ask her where she lived and if she bought her clothes here or across the border. He wondered if these girls had ever been across to the United States, if they had boy friends in Los Angeles, if they were as good in bed as they looked to be. Something, some force not visible, made their lives possible. He hoped that at the same time it did not make them frigid; what a travesty of life, on the potency of natural creatures, that would be.

The trouble with such girls, he thought, is that they get old so fast. What you hear is true; by thirty they're worn out, fat, the bra and the coat and purse and gloves are gone; all that remains is the black, burning eyes peering out from beneath the shaggy brows, the original slender creature still imprisoned somewhere within but unable to speak any longer, play or make love or run. The click of heels against the pavement, the rushing forward into life; that's gone and only a slopping, dragging sound is left behind. The most horrid sound in the world, that of the once-was: alive in the past, perishing in the present, a corpse made of dust in the future. Nothing changes in Tijuana and yet nothing lives out its normal span. Time moves too fast here and also not at all. Look at my situation, for instance, he thought. I'm committing suicide ten years in the future, or rather I'll wipe out a life ten years ago. If I do this, what becomes of the Eric Sweetscent now working for Kaiser in Oakland? And the ten years he's spent watching over Kathy – what does that do to her?

Maybe this is my weak way of hurting her. A further punishment because she's sick.

Underneath my rationality my warped view, he thought. You can't quite manage to punish the sick enough. Is that it? Christ, he thought. No wonder I feel hatred for myself.

Holding the package of g-Totex blau in the palm of his hand, he weighed it, experienced its mass. Felt the Earth's attraction for it. Yes, he thought, the Earth likes even this. She accepts everything.

Something ran across his shoe.

He saw, skittering away into the safety of the shadows and heaps of debris, a small wheeled cart.

The cart was pursued by another of its kind. They met, in the tangle of newspapers and bottles, and then the debris trembled and bits flew everywhere as the carts fought it out, ramming each other head-on, trying for the cephalic unit mounted in each other's center. Trying to knock out the Lazy Brown Dog.

Still alive? he thought in disbelief. Ten years later? But possibly Bruce Himmel still manufactured them. By now Tijuana must be overrun by them, if that was so. It was hard to know how to take such a sight. He continued to watch the two carts as they battled it out to the end; now one had knocked its antagonist's Lazy Brown Dog loose, seemed to be triumphing. It withdrew and, like a goat, maneuvered to locate itself for the coup de grace.

While it was positioning itself the damaged one, in a last burst of native wit, popped into the sanctuary of a discarded galvanized zinc bucket and was out of the fray. Protected, it became inert, prepared to wait things out, forever if necessary.

Getting to his feet, Eric stooped and grabbed up the stronger cart; its wheels spun futilely and then somehow it managed to twist out of his grasp. It bounced clatteringly to the pavement, backed, maneuvered, and then hurled itself against his foot. Surprised, he retreated. The cart made another menacing move toward him and he retreated again. Satisfied, the cart wheeled in a circle and then rattled off, out of sight.

In the bucket the loser could still be seen. Still waiting.

'I won't hurt you,' Eric said to it, crouching down in order to get a better glimpse of it. The damaged thing, however, remained where it was. 'Okay,' he said and straightened up. 'I get the idea.' It knew what it wanted. There was no point in molesting it.

Even these things, he decided, are determined to live. Bruce was right. They deserve their opportunity, their minuscule place under the sun and sky. That's all they're asking for and it isn't much. He thought. And I can't even do what they do, make my stand, use my wits to survive in a debris-littered alley in Tijuana; that thing that's taken refuge there in that zinc bucket, without a wife, a career, a conapt or money or the possibility of encountering any of these, still persists. For reasons unknown to me its stake in existence is greater than mine.

The g-Totex blau no longer seemed attractive to him.

Even if I'm going to do this, he thought, why does it have to be now? Like everything else it can be put off – ought, in this case, to be put off. And anyhow he did not feel well; he felt dizzy and he shut his eyes, although by doing so he was inviting another attack by the fearsome Lazy Brown Dog cart which Bruce Himmel had made.

The slight weight in his hand disappeared entirely. He opened his eyes, saw that the paper bag with its black carton inside, the box of g-Totex blau, had disappeared. And the litter heaped here and there in the alley did not appear quite as extensive. From the long shadows cast by the sun he knew that it had become late in the day and this meant that the JJ-180 had worn off and he had gone back in time to – roughly – his own period. But he had taken the piece of capsule at night, in the dark, and this seemed more like five p.m. So, as before, the return was not exact and he wondered just how far off it was in this instance. After all, the 'Starmen were on their way.

In fact, he saw, they had already arrived.

Overhead a vast, dark, ugly mass hung in the sky, like something that had descended into this world from a lightless land of iron and surprise and frightened, purposeful silence. It was huge enough, he thought, to feed forever; even from the spot where he stood, at the very least a mile from it, he could see that it consisted of a limitless, appetitive self which would begin any time now to gulp down everything in sight. It made no sound. Its engines were off. This ship had come a long way, from the lines deep in intersystem space. It was a seasoned, informed, world-weary apparition, brought out by strange needs from its normal place of residence.

I wonder how easy it's going to be, Eric wondered. For them simply to drop to the surface and enter key buildings and take everything over. Probably easier than I think, than anyone here on Terra thinks.

He walked from the alley to the street, thinking to himself, I wish I had a gun.

Strange, he thought, that in the center of the greatest abomination of our time, this war, I should find something meaningful. A desire animating me equal to that possessed by the Lazy Brown Dog cart hiding in the zinc pail ten years from now. Maybe I'm its compatriot at last. Able to take my place in the world beside it, do as it does, fight as it fights; whenever it's necessary and then some, for the pleasure of it. For the joy. As was intended from the start anterior to any time or condition I could comprehend or call my own or enter into.

Traffic had slowed to a near stop along the street. Everyone, in the vehicles and on foot, watched the 'Star ship.

'Taxi!' Walking out into the street he hailed an autonomic cab capable of non-surface flight. 'Take me to Tijuana Fur & Dye,' he ordered it. 'Make it as fast as you can and don't pay any attention to that ship up there, including any instructions it might broadcast.'

The cab shuddered, rose slightly from the asphalt, and hung stationary. 'We've been forbidden to take off, sir. The Lilistar Army Command for this area sent out orders that—'

'I'm in supreme charge of this situation,' Eric told the cab. 'I outrank the Lilistar Army Command; they're dirt compared with me. I have to be at Tijuana Fur & Dye immediately – the war effort hangs on my being there.'

'Yes sir,' the cab said, and soared up into the sky. 'And it's an honor, sir; believe me, a rare honor to convey you.'

'My presence there,' Eric said, 'is of incomparable strategic importance.' At the factory I'll make my stand, he said to himself. With the people I know. And, when Virgil Ackerman escapes to Wash-35, I'll go along with him; it's beginning to unfold as I witnessed it a year from now.

And, at Tijuana Fur & Dye, he realized, I'll undoubtedly run into Kathy.

To the cab he said suddenly, 'If your wife were sick—'

'I have no wife, sir,' the cab said. 'Automatic Mechanisms never marry; everyone knows that.'

'All right,' Eric agreed. 'If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would mean—'

'I can see what you mean, sir,' the cab broke in. 'It would mean no other life for you beyond caring for her.'

'That's right,' Eric said.

'I'd stay with her,' the cab decided.

'Why?'

'Because,' the cab said, 'life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions.'

'I think I agree,' Eric said after a time. 'I think I will stay with her.'

'God bless you, sir,' the cab said. 'I can see that you're a good man.'

'Thank you,' Eric said.

The cab soared on toward Tijuana Fur & Dye Corporation.