A Little Something for Us Tempunauts

   Wearily, Addison Doug plodded up the long path of synthetic redwood rounds, step by step, his head down a little, moving as if he were in actual physical pain. The girl watched him, wanting to help him, hurt within her to see how worn and unhappy he was, but at the same time she rejoiced that he was there at all. On and on, toward her, without glancing up, going by feel… like he’s done this many times, she thought suddenly. Knows the way too well. Why?
   “Addi,” she called, and ran toward him. “They said on the TV you were dead. All of you were killed!”
   He paused, wiping back his dark hair, which was no longer long; just before the launch they had cropped it. But he had evidently forgotten. “You believe everything you see on TV?” he said, and came on again, haltingly, but smiling now. And reaching up for her.
   God, it felt good to hold him, and to have him clutch at her again, with more strength than she had expected. “I was going to find somebody else,” she gasped. “To replace you.”
   “I’ll knock your head off if you do,” he said. “Anyhow, that isn’t possible; nobody could replace me.”
   “But what about the implosion?” she said. “On reentry; they said—”
   “I forget,” Addison said, in the tone he used when he meant, I’m not going to discuss it. The tone had always angered her before, but not now. This time she sensed how awful the memory was. “I’m going to stay at your place a couple of days,” he said, as together they moved up the path toward the open front door of the tilted A-frame house. “If that’s okay. And Benz and Crayne will be joining me, later on; maybe even as soon as tonight. We’ve got a lot to talk over and figure out.”
   “Then all three of you survived.” She gazed up into his careworn face. “Everything they said on TV…” She understood, then. Or believed she did. “It was a cover story. For—political purposes, to fool the Russians. Right? I mean, the Soviet Union’ll think the launch was a failure because on reentry—”
   “No,” he said. “A chrononaut will be joining us, most likely. To help figure out what happened. General Toad said one of them is already on his way here; they got clearance already. Because of the gravity of the situation.”
   “Jesus,” the girl said, stricken. “Then who’s the cover story for?”
   “Let’s have something to drink,” Addison said. “And then I’ll outline it all for you.”
   “Only thing I’ve got at the moment is California brandy.”
   Addison Doug said, “I’d drink anything right now, the way I feel.” He dropped to the couch, leaned back, and sighed a ragged, distressed sigh, as the girl hurriedly began fixing both of them a drink.

   The FM-radio in the car yammered, “…grieves at the stricken turn of events precipitating out of an unheralded…”
   “Official nonsense babble,” Crayne said, shutting off the radio. He and Benz were having trouble finding the house, having been there only once before. It struck Crayne that this was somewhat informal a way of convening a conference of this importance, meeting at Addison’s chick’s pad out here in the boondocks of Ojai. On the other hand, they wouldn’t be pestered by the curious. And they probably didn’t have much time. But that was hard to say; about that no one knew for sure.
   The hills on both sides of the road had once been forests, Crayne observed. Now housing tracts and their melted, irregular, plastic roads marred every rise in sight. “I’ll bet this was nice once,” he said to Benz, who was driving.
   “The Los Padres National Forest is near here,” Benz said. “I got lost in there when I was eight. For hours I was sure a rattler would get me. Every stick was a snake.”
   “The rattler’s got you now,” Crayne said.
   “All of us,” Benz said.
   “You know,” Crayne said, “it’s a hell of an experience to be dead.”
   “Speak for yourself.”
   “But technically—”
   “If you listen to the radio and TV.” Benz turned toward him, his big gnome face bleak with admonishing sternness. “We’re no more dead than anyone else on the planet. The difference for us is that our death date is in the past, whereas everyone else’s is set somewhere at an uncertain time in the future. Actually, some people have it pretty damn well set, like people in cancer wards; they’re as certain as we are. More so. For example, how long can we stay here before we go back? We have a margin, a latitude that a terminal cancer victim doesn’t have.”
   Crayne said cheerfully, “The next thing you’ll be telling us to cheer us up is that we’re in no pain.”
   “Addi is. I watched him lurch off earlier today. He’s got it psychosomatically—made it into a physical complaint. Like God’s kneeling on his neck; you know, carrying a much-too-great burden that’s unfair, only he won’t complain out loud… just points now and then at the nail hole in his hand.” He grinned.
   “Addi has got more to live for than we do.”
   “Every man has more to live for than any other man. I don’t have a cute chick to sleep with, but I’d like to see the semis rolling along Riverside Freeway at sunset a few more times. It’s not what you have to live for; it’s that you want to live to see it, to be there—that’s what is so damn sad.”
   They rode on in silence.

   In the quiet living room of the girl’s house the three tempunauts sat around smoking, taking it easy; Addison Doug thought to himself that the girl looked unusually foxy and desirable in her stretched-tight white sweater and micro-skirt and he wished, wistfully, that she looked a little less interesting. He could not really afford to get embroiled in such stuff, at this point. He was too tired.
   “Does she know,” Benz said, indicating the girl, “what this is all about? I mean, can we talk openly? It won’t wipe her out?”
   “I haven’t explained it to her yet,” Addison said.
   “You goddam well better,” Crayne said.
   “What is it?” the girl said, stricken, sitting upright with one hand directly between her breasts. As if clutching at a religious artifact that isn’t there, Addison thought.
   “We got snuffed on reentry,” Benz said. He was, really, the crudest of the three. Or at least the most blunt. “You see, Miss…”
   “Hawkins,” the girl whispered.
   “Glad to meet you, Miss Hawkins.” Benz surveyed her in his cold, lazy fashion. “You have a first name?”
   “Merry Lou.”
   “Okay, Merry Lou,” Benz said. To the other two men he observed, “Sounds like the name a waitress has stitched on her blouse. Merry Lou’s my name and I’ll be serving you dinner and breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast for the next few days or however long it is before you all give up and go back to your own time; that’ll be fifty-three dollars and eight cents, please, not including tip And I hope y’all never come back, y’hear?” He voice had begun to shake; his cigarette, too. “Sorry, Miss Hawkins,” he said then. “We’re all screwed up by the implosion at reentry. As soon as we got here in ETA we learned about it. We’ve known longer than anyone else; we knew as soon as we hit Emergence Time.”
   “But there’s nothing we could do,” Crayne said.
   “There’s nothing anyone can do,” Addison said to her, and put his arm around her. It felt like a deja vu thing but then it hit him. We’re in a closed time loop, he thought, we keep going through this again and again, trying to solve the reentry problem, each time imagining it’s the first time, the only time… and never succeeding. Which attempt is this? Maybe the millionth; we have sat here a million times, raking the same facts over and over again and getting nowhere. He felt bone-weary, thinking that. And he felt a sort of vast philosophical hate toward all other men, who did not have this enigma to deal with. We all go to one place, he thought, as the Bible says. But… for the three of us, we have been there already. Are lying there now. So it’s wrong to ask us to stand around on the surface of Earth afterward and argue and worry about it and try to figure out what malfunctioned. That should be, rightly, for our heirs to do. We’ve had enough already.
   He did not say this aloud, though—for their sake.
   “Maybe you bumped into something,” the girl said.
   Glancing at the others, Benz said sardonically, “Maybe we ‘bumped into something.’ ”
   “The TV commentators kept saying that,” Merry Lou said, “about the hazard in reentry of being out of phase spatially and colliding right down to the molecular level with tangent objects, any one of which—” She gestured. “You know. ‘No two objects can occupy the same space at the same time.’ So everything blew up, for that reason.” She glanced around questioningly.
   “That is the major risk factor,” Crayne acknowledged. “At least theoretically, as Dr. Fein at Planning calculated when they got into the hazard question. But we had a variety of safety locking devices provided that functioned automatically. Reentry couldn’t occur unless these assists had stabilized us spatially so we would not overlap. Of course, all those devices, in sequence, might have failed. One after the other. I was watching my feedback metric scopes on launch, and they agreed, every one of them, that we were phased properly at that time. And I heard no warning tones. Saw none, neither.” He grimaced. “At least it didn’t happen then.”
   Suddenly Benz said, “Do you realize that our next of kin are now rich? All our Federal and commercial life-insurance payoff. Our ‘next of kin’—God forbid, that’s us, I guess. We can apply for tens of thousands of dollars, cash on the line. Walk into our brokers’ offices and say, ‘I’m dead; lay the heavy bread on me.
   Addison Doug was thinking, The public memorial services. That they have planned, after the autopsies. That long line of black-draped Cads going down Pennsylvania Avenue, with all the government dignitaries and double-domed scientist types—and we’ll be there. Not once but twice. Once in the oak hand-rubbed brass-fitted flag-draped caskets, but also… maybe riding in open limos, waving at the crowds of mourners.
   “The ceremonies,” he said aloud.
   The others stared at him, angrily, not comprehending. And then, one by one, they understood; he saw it on their faces.
   “No,” Benz grated. “That’s—impossible.”
   Crayne shook his head emphatically. “They’ll order us to be there, and we will be. Obeying orders.”
   “Will we have to smile?”Addison said. “To fucking smile?”

   “No,” General Toad said slowly, his great wattled head shivering about on his broomstick neck, the color of his skin dirty and mottled, as if the mass of decorations on his stiff-board collar had started part of him decaying away. “You are not to smile, but on the contrary are to adopt a properly grief-stricken manner. In keeping with the national mood of sorrow at this time.”
   “That’ll be hard to do,” Crayne said.
   The Russian chrononaut showed no response; his thin beaked face, narrow within his translating earphones, remained strained with concern.
   “The nation,” General Toad said, “will become aware of your presence among us once more for this brief interval; cameras of all major TV networks will pan up to you without warning, and at the same time, the various commentators have been instructed to tell their audiences something like the following.” He got out a piece of typed material, put on his glasses, cleared his throat and said, “ ‘We seem to be focusing on three figures riding together. Can’t quite make them out. Can you?’ ” General Toad lowered the paper. “At this point they’ll interrogate their colleagues extempore. Finally they’ll exclaim, ‘Why, Roger,’ or Walter or Ned, as the case may be, according to the individual network—”
   “Or Bill,” Crayne said. “In case it’s the Bufonidae network, down there in the swamp.”
   General Toad ignored him. “They will severally exclaim, ‘Why Roger I believe we’re seeing the three tempunauts themselves! Does this indeed mean that somehow the difficulty—?’ And then the colleague commentator says in his somewhat more somber voice, ‘What we’re seeing at this time, I think, David,’ or Henry or Pete or Ralph, whichever it is, ‘consists of mankind’s first verified glimpse of what the technical people refer to as Emergence Time Activity or ETA. Contrary to what might seem to be the case at first sight, these are not–repeat, not—our three valiant tempunauts as such, as we would ordinarily experience them, but more likely picked up by our cameras as the three of them are temporarily suspended in their voyage to the future, which we initially had reason to hope would take place in a time continuum roughly a hundred years from now… but it would seem that they somehow undershot and are here now, at this moment, which of course is, as we know, our present.’ ”
   Addison Doug closed his eyes and thought, Crayne will ask him if he can be panned up on by the TV cameras holding a balloon and eating cotton candy. I think we’re all going nuts from this, all of us. And then he wondered, How many times have we gone through this idiotic exchange?
   I can’t prove it, he thought wearily. But I know it’s true. We’ve sat here, done this minuscule scrabbling, listened to and said all this crap, many times. He shuddered. Each rinky-dink word…
   “What’s the matter?” Benz said acutely.
   The Soviet chrononaut spoke up for the first time. “What is the maximum interval of ETA possible to your three-man team? And how large a per cent has been exhausted by now?”
   After a pause Crayne said, “They briefed us on that before we came in here today. We’ve consumed approximately one-half of our maximum total ETA interval.”
   “However,” General Toad rumbled, “we have scheduled the Day of National Mourning to fall within the expected period remaining to them of ETA time. This required us to speed up the autopsy and other forensic findings, but in view of public sentiment, it was felt…”
   The autopsy, Addison Doug thought, and again he shuddered; this time he could not keep his thoughts within himself and he said, “Why don’t we adjourn this nonsense meeting and drop down to pathology and view a few tissue sections enlarged and in color, and maybe we’ll brainstorm a couple of vital concepts that’ll aid medical science in its quest for explanations? Explanations—that’s what we need. Explanations for problems that don’t exist yet; we can develop the problems later.” He paused. “Who agrees?”
   “I’m not looking at my spleen up there on the screen,” Benz said. “I’ll ride in the parade but I won’t participate in my own autopsy.”
   “You could distribute microscopic purple-stained slices of your own gut to the mourners along the way,” Crayne said. “They could provide each of us with a doggy bag; right, General? We can strew tissue sections like confetti. I still think we should smile.”
   “I have researched all the memoranda about smiling,” General Toad said, riffling the pages stacked before him, “and the consensus at policy is that smiling is not in accord with national sentiment. So that issue must be ruled closed. As far as your participating in the autopsical procedures which are now in progress—”
   “We’re missing out as we sit here,” Crayne said to Addison Doug. “I always miss out.”
   Ignoring him, Addison addressed the Soviet chrononaut. “Officer N. Gauki,” he said into his microphone, dangling on his chest, “what in your mind is the greatest terror facing a time traveler? That there will be an implosion due to coincidence on reentry, such as has occurred in our launch? Or did other traumatic obsessions bother you and your comrade during your own brief but highly successful time flight?”
   N. Gauki, after a pause, answered, “R. Plenya and I exchanged views at several informal times. I believe I can speak for us both when I respond to your question by emphasizing our perpetual fear that we had inadvertently entered a closed time loop and would never break out.”
   “You’d repeat it forever?” Addison Doug asked.
   “Yes, Mr. A. Doug,” the chrononaut said, nodding somberly.
   A fear that he had never experienced before overcame Addison Doug. He turned helplessly to Benz and muttered, “Shit.” They gazed at each other.
   “I really don’t believe this is what happened,” Benz said to him in a low voice, putting his hand on Doug’s shoulder; he gripped hard, the grip of friendship. “We just imploded on reentry, that’s all. Take it easy.”
   “Could we adjourn soon?” Addison Doug said in a hoarse, strangling voice, half rising from his chair. He felt the room and the people in it rushing in at him, suffocating him. Claustrophobia, he realized. Like when I was in grade school, when they flashed a surprise test on our teaching machines, and I saw I couldn’t pass it. “Please,” he said simply, standing. They were all looking at him, with different expressions. The Russian’s face was especially sympathetic, and deeply lined with care. Addison wished—“I want to go home,” he said to them all, and felt stupid.

   He was drunk. It was late at night, at a bar on Hollywood Boulevard; fortunately, Merry Lou was with him, and he was having a good time. Everyone was telling him so, anyhow. He clung to Merry Lou and said, “The great unity in life, the supreme unity and meaning, is man and woman. Their absolute unity; right?”
   “I know,” Merry Lou said. “We studied that in class.” Tonight, at his request, Merry Lou was a small blonde girl, wearing purple bellbottoms and high heels and an open midriff blouse. Earlier she had had a lapis lazuli in her navel, but during dinner at Ting Ho’s it had popped out and been lost. The owner of the restaurant had promised to keep on searching for it, but Merry Lou had been gloomy ever since. It was, she said, symbolic. But of what she did not say. Or anyhow he could not remember; maybe that was it. She had told him what it meant, and he had forgotten.
   An elegant young black at a nearby table, with an Afro and striped vest and overstuffed red tie, had been staring at Addison for some time. He obviously wanted to come over to their table but was afraid to; meanwhile, he kept on staring.
   “Did you ever get the sensation,” Addison said to Merry Lou, “that you knew exactly what was about to happen? What someone was going to say? Word for word? Down to the slightest detail. As if you had already lived through it once before?”
   “Everybody gets into that space,” Merry Lou said. She sipped a Bloody Mary.
   The black rose and walked toward them. He stood by Addison. “I’m sorry to bother you, sir.”
   Addison said to Merry Lou, “He’s going to say, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere? Didn’t I see you on TV?’ ”
   “That was precisely what I intended to say,” the black said.
   Addison said, “You undoubtedly saw my picture on page forty-six of the current issue of Time, the section on new medical discoveries. I’m the G.P. from a small town in Iowa catapulted to fame by my invention of a widespread, easily available cure for eternal life. Several of the big pharmaceutical houses are already bidding on my vaccine.”
   “That might have been where I saw your picture,” the black said, but he did not appear convinced. Nor did he appear drunk; he eyed Addison Doug intensely. “May I seat myself with you and the lady?”
   “Sure,” Addison Doug said. He now saw, in the man’s hand, the ID of the U.S. security agency that had ridden herd on the project from the start.
   “Mr. Doug,” the security agent said as he seated himself beside Addison, “you really shouldn’t be here shooting off your mouth like this. If I recognized you some other dude might and break out. It’s all classified until the Day of Mourning. Technically, you’re in violation of a Federal Statute by being here; did you realize that? I should haul you in. But this is a difficult situation; we don’t want to do something uncool and make a scene. Where are your two colleagues?”
   “At my place,” Merry Lou said. She had obviously not seen the ID. “Listen,” she said sharply to the agent, “why don’t you get lost? My husband here has been through a grueling ordeal, and this is his only chance to unwind.”
   Addison looked at the man. “I knew what you were going to say before you came over here.” Word for word, he thought. I am right, and Benz is wrong and this will keep happening, this replay.
   “Maybe,” the security agent said, “I can induce you to go back to Miss Hawkins’ place voluntarily. Some info arrived”—he tapped the tiny earphone in his right ear—“just a few minutes ago, to all of us, to deliver to you, marked urgent, if we located you. At the launchsite ruins… they’ve been combing through the rubble, you know?”
   “I know,” Addison said.
   “They think they have their first clue. Something was brought back by one of you. From ETA, over and above what you took, in violation of all your pre-launch training.”
   “Let me ask you this,” Addison Doug said. “Suppose somebody does see me? Suppose somebody does recognize me? So what?”
   “The public believes that even though reentry failed, the flight into time, the first American time-travel launch, was successful. Three U.S. tempunauts were thrust a hundred years into the future—roughly twice as far as the Soviet launch of last year. That you only went a week will be less of a shock if it’s believed that you three chose deliberately to remanifest at this continuum because you wished to attend, in fact felt compelled to attend—”
   “We wanted to be in the parade,” Addison interrupted. “Twice.”
   “You were drawn to the dramatic and somber spectacle of your own funeral procession, and will be glimpsed there by the alert camera crews of all major networks. Mr. Doug, really, an awful lot of high-level planning and expense have gone into this to help correct a dreadful situation; trust us, believe me. It’ll be easier on the public, and that’s vital, if there’s ever to be another U.S. time shot. And that is, after all, what we all want.”
   Addison Doug stared at him. “We want what?”
   Uneasily, the security agent said, “To take further trips into time. As you have done. Unfortunately, you yourself cannot ever do so again, because of the tragic implosion and death of the three of you. But other tempunauts—”
   “We want what? Is that what we want?” Addison’s voice rose; people at nearby tables were watching now. Nervously.
   “Certainly,” the agent said. “And keep your voice down.”
   “I don’t want that,” Addison said. “I want to stop. To stop forever. To just lie in the ground, in the dust, with everyone else. To see no more summers—the same summer.”
   “Seen one, you’ve seen them all,” Merry Lou said hysterically. “I think he’s right, Addi; we should get out of here. You’ve had too many drinks, and it’s late, and this news about the—”
   Addison broke in, “What was brought back? How much extra mass?”
   The security agent said, “Preliminary analysis shows that machinery weighing about one hundred pounds was lugged back into the time-field of the module and picked up along with you. This much mass—” The agent gestured. “That blew up the pad right on the spot. It couldn’t begin to compensate for that much more than had occupied its open area at launch time.”
   “Wow!” Merry Lou said, eyes wide. “Maybe somebody sold one of you a quadraphonic phono for a dollar ninety-eight including fifteen-inch air-suspension speakers and a lifetime supply of Neil Diamond records.” She tried to laugh, but failed; her eyes dimmed over. “Addi,” she whispered, “I’m sorry. But it’s sort of—weird. I mean, it’s absurd; you all were briefed, weren’t you, about your return weight? You weren’t even to add so much as a piece of paper to what you took. I even saw Dr. Fein demonstrating the reasons on TV. And one of you hoisted a hundred pounds of machinery into that field? You must have been trying to self-destruct, to do that!” Tears slid from her eyes; one tear rolled out onto her nose and hung there. He reached reflexively to wipe it away, as if helping a little girl rather than a grown one.
   “I’ll fly you to the analysis site,” the security agent said, standing up. He and Addison helped Merry Lou to her feet; she trembled as she stood a moment, finishing her Bloody Mary. Addison felt acute sorrow for her, but then, almost at once, it passed. He wondered why. One can weary even of that, he conjectured. Of caring for someone. If it goes on too long—on and on. Forever. And, at last, even after that, into something no one before, not God Himself, maybe, had ever had to suffer and in the end, for all His great heart, succumb to.
   As they walked through the crowded bar toward the street, Addison Doug said to the security agent, “Which one of us—”
   “They know which one,” the agent said as he held the door to the street open for Merry Lou. The agent stood, now, behind Addison, signaling for a gray Federal car to land at the red parking area. Two other security agents, in uniform, hurried toward them.
   “Was it me?” Addison Doug asked.
   “You better believe it,” the security agent said.

   The funeral procession moved with aching solemnity down Pennsylvania Avenue, three flag-draped caskets and dozens of black limousines passing between rows of heavily coated, shivering mourners. A low haze hung over the day, gray outlines of buildings faded into the rain-drenched murk of the Washington March day.
   Scrutinizing the lead Cadillac through prismatic binoculars, TV’s top news and public-events commentator, Henry Cassidy, droned on at his vast unseen audience, “…sad recollections of that earlier train among the wheatfields carrying the coffin of Abraham Lincoln back to burial and the nation’s capital. And what a sad day this is, and what appropriate weather, with its dour overcast and sprinkles!” In his monitor he saw the zoomar lens pan up on the fourth Cadillac, as it followed those with the caskets of the dead tempunauts.
   His engineer tapped him on the arm.
   “We appear to be focusing on three unfamiliar figures so far not identified, riding together,” Henry Cassidy said into his neck mike, nodding agreement. “So far I’m unable to quite make them out. Are your location and vision any better from where you’re placed, Everett?” he inquired of his colleague and pressed the button that notified Everett Branton to replace him on the air.
   “Why, Henry,” Branton said in a voice of growing excitement, “I believe we’re actually eyewitness to the three American tempunauts as they remanifest themselves on their historic journey into the future!”
   “Does this signify,” Cassidy said, “that somehow they have managed to solve and overcome the—”
   “Afraid not, Henry,” Branton said in his slow, regretful voice. “What we’re eyewitnessing to our complete surprise consists of the Western world’s first verified glimpse of what the technical people refer to as Emergence Time Activity.”
   “Ah, yes, ETA,” Cassidy said brightly, reading it off the official script the Federal authorities had handed to him before air time.
   “Right, Henry. Contrary to what might seem to be the case at first sight, these are not—repeat not—our three brave tempunauts as such, as we would ordinarily experience them—”
   “I grasp it now, Everett,” Cassidy broke in excitedly, since his authorized script read CASS BREAKS IN EXCITEDLY. “Our three tempunauts have momentarily suspended in their historic voyage to the future, which we believe will span across a time-continuum roughly a century from now… It would seem that the overwhelming grief and drama of this unanticipated day of mourning has caused them to—”
   “Sorry to interrupt, Henry,” Everett Branton said, “but I think, since the procession has momentarily halted on its slow march forward, that we might be able to—”
   “No!” Cassidy said, as a note was handed him in a swift scribble, reading: Do not interview nauts. Urgent. Dis. previous inst. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to…” he continued, “…to speak briefly with tempunauts Benz, Crayne, and Doug, as you had hoped, Everett. As we had all briefly hoped to.” He wildly waved the boom-mike back; it had already begun to swing out expectantly toward the stopped Cadillac. Cassidy shook his head violently at the mike technician and his engineer.
   Perceiving the boom-mike swinging at them Addison Doug stood up in the back of the open Cadillac. Cassidy groaned. He wants to speak, he realized. Didn’t they reinstruct him? Why am I the only one they get across to? Other boom-mikes representing other networks plus radio station interviewers on foot now were rushing out to thrust up their microphones into the faces of the three tempunauts, especially Addison Doug’s. Doug was already beginning to speak, in response to a question shouted up to him by a reporter. With his boom-mike off, Cassidy couldn’t hear the question, nor Doug’s answer. With reluctance, he signaled for his own boom-mike to trigger on.
   “…before,” Doug was saying loudly.
   “In what manner, ‘All this has happened before’?” the radio reporter, standing close to the car, was saying.
   “I mean,” U.S. tempunaut Addison Doug declared, his face red and strained, “that I have stood here in this spot and said again and again, and all of you have viewed this parade and our deaths at reentry endless times, a closed cycle of trapped time which must be broken.”
   “Are you seeking,” another reporter jabbered up at Addison Doug, “for a solution to the reentry implosion disaster which can be applied in retrospect so that when you do return to the past you will be able to correct the malfunction and avoid the tragedy which cost—or for you three, will cost—your lives?”
   Tempunaut Benz said, “We are doing that, yes.”
   “Trying to ascertain the cause of the violent implosion and eliminate the cause before we return,” tempunaut Crayne added, nodding. “We have learned already that, for reasons unknown, a mass of nearly one hundred pounds of miscellaneous Volkswagen motor parts, including cylinders, the head…”
   This is awful, Cassidy thought. “This is amazing!” he said aloud, into his neck mike. “The already tragically deceased U.S. tempunauts, with a determination that could emerge only from the rigorous training and discipline to which they were subjected—and we wondered why at the time but can clearly see why now—have already analyzed the mechanical slip-up responsible, evidently, for their own deaths, and have begun the laborious process of sifting through and eliminating causes of that slip-up so that they can return to their original launch site and reenter without mishap.”
   “One wonders,” Branton mumbled onto the air and into his feedback earphone, “what the consequences of this alteration of the near past will be. If in reentry they do not implode and are not killed, then they will not—well, it’s too complex for me, Henry, these time paradoxes that Dr. Fein at the Time Extrusion Labs in Pasadena has so frequently and eloquently brought to our attention.”
   Into all the microphones available, of all sorts, tempunaut Addison Doug was saying, more quietly now, “We must not eliminate the cause of reentry implosion. The only way out of this trap is for us to die. Death is the only solution for this. For the three of us.” He was interrupted as the procession of Cadillacs began to move forward.
   Shutting off his mike momentarily, Henry Cassidy said to his engineer, “Is he nuts?”
   “Only time will tell,” his engineer said in a hard-to-hear voice.
   “An extraordinary moment in the history of the United States’ involvement in time travel,” Cassidy said, then, into his now live mike. “Only time will tell—if you will pardon the inadvertent pun—whether tempunaut Doug’s cryptic remarks, uttered impromptu at this moment of supreme suffering for him, as in a sense to a lesser degree it is for all of us, are the words of a man deranged by grief or an accurate insight into the macabre dilemma that in theoretical terms we knew all along might eventually confront—confront and strike down with its lethal blow—a time-travel launch, either ours or the Russians’.”
   He segued, then, to a commercial.
   “You know,” Branton’s voice muttered in his ear, not on the air but just to the control room and to him, “if he’s right they ought to let the poor bastards die.”
   “They ought to release them,” Cassidy agreed. “My God, the way Doug looked and talked, you’d imagine he’d gone through this for a thousand years and then some! I wouldn’t be in his shoes for anything.”
   “I’ll bet you fifty bucks,” Branton said, “they have gone through this before. Many times.”
   “Then we have, too,” Cassidy said.
   Rain fell now, making all the lined-up mourners shiny. Their faces, their eyes, even their clothes—everything glistened in wet reflections of broken, fractured light, bent and sparkling, as, from gathering gray formless layers above them, the day darkened.
   “Are we on the air?” Branton asked.
   Who knows? Cassidy thought. He wished the day would end.

   The Soviet chrononaut N. Gauki lifted both hands impassionedly and spoke to the Americans across the table from him in a voice of extreme urgency. “It is the opinion of myself and my colleague R. Plenya, who for his pioneering achievements in time travel has been certified a Hero of the Soviet People, and rightly so, that based on our own experience and on theoretical material developed both in your own academic circles and in the soviet Academy of Sciences of the USSR, we believe that tempunaut A. Doug’s fears may be justified. And his deliberate destruction of himself and his teammates at reentry, by hauling a huge mass of auto back with him from ETA, in violation of his orders, should be regarded as the act of a desperate man with no other means of escape. Of course, the decision is up to you. We have only advisory position in this matter.”
   Addison Doug played with his cigarette lighter on the table and did not look up. His ears hummed, and he wondered what that meant. It had an electronic quality. Maybe we’re within the module again, he thought. But he didn’t perceive it; he felt the reality of the people around him, the table, the blue plastic lighter between his fingers. No smoking in the module during reentry, he thought. He put the lighter carefully away in his pocket.
   “We’ve developed no concrete evidence whatsoever,” General Toad said, “that a closed time loop has been set up. There’s only the subjective feelings of fatigue on the part of Mr. Doug. Just his belief that he’s done all this repeatedly. As he says, it is very probably psychological in nature.” He rooted, piglike, among the papers before him. “I have a report, not disclosed to the media, from four psychiatrists at Yale on his psychological makeup. Although unusually stable, there is a tendency toward cyclothymia on his part, culminating in acute depression. This naturally was taken into account long before the launch, but it was calculated that the joyful qualities of the two others in the team would offset this functionally. Anyhow, that depressive tendency in him is exceptionally high, now.” He held the paper out, but no one at the table accepted it. “Isn’t it true, Dr. Fein,” he said, “that an acutely depressed person experiences time in a peculiar way, that is, circular time, time repeating itself, getting nowhere, around and around? The person gets so psychotic that he refuses to let go of the past. Reruns it in his head constantly.”
   “But you see,” Dr. Fein said, “this subjective sensation of being trapped is perhaps all we would have.” This was the research physicist whose basic work had laid the theoretical foundation for the project. “If a closed loop did unfortunately lock into being.”
   “The general,” Addison Doug said, “is using words he doesn’t understand.”
   “I researched the one I was unfamiliar with.” General Toad said. “The technical psychiatric terms… I know what they mean.”
   To Addison Doug, Benz said, “Where’d you get all those VW parts, Addi?”
   “I don’t have them yet,” Addison Doug said.
   “Probably picked up the first junk he could lay his hands on,” Crayne said. “Whatever was available, just before we started back.”
   “Will start back,” Addison Doug corrected.
   “Here are my instructions to the three of you,” General Toad said. “You are not in any way to attempt to cause damage or implosion or malfunction during reentry, either by lugging back extra mass or by any other method that enters your mind. You are to return as scheduled and in replica of the prior simulations. This especially applies to you, Mr. Doug.” The phone by his right arm buzzed. He frowned, picked up the receiver. An interval passed, and then he scowled deeply and set the receiver back down, loudly.
   “You’ve been overruled,” Dr. Fein said.
   “Yes, I have,” General Toad said. “And I must say at this time that I am personally glad because my decision was an unpleasant one.”
   “Then we can arrange for implosion at reentry,” Benz said after a pause. “The three of you are to make the decision,” General Toad said. “Since it involves your lives. It’s been entirely left up to you. Whichever way you want it. If you’re convinced you’re in a closed time loop, and you believe a massive implosion at reentry will abolish it—” He ceased talking, as tempunaut Doug rose to his feet. “Are you going to make another speech, Doug?” he said.
   “I just want to thank everyone involved,” Addison Doug said. “For letting us decide.” He gazed haggard-faced and wearily around at all the individuals seated at the table. “I really appreciate it.”
   “You know,” Benz said slowly, “blowing us up at reentry could add nothing to the chances of abolishing a closed loop. In fact that could do it, Doug.”
   “Not if it kills us all,” Crayne said.
   “You agree with Addi?” Benz said.
   “Dead is dead,” Crayne said. “I’ve been pondering it. What other way is more likely to get us out of this? Than if we’re dead? What possible other way?”
   “You may be in no loop,” Dr. Fein pointed out.
   “But we may be,” Crayne said.
   Doug, still on his feet, said to Crayne and Benz, “Could we include Merry Lou in our decision-making?”
   “Why?” Benz said.
   “I can’t think too clearly any more,” Doug said. “Merry Lou can help me; I depend on her.”
   “Sure,” Crayne said. Benz, too, nodded.
   General Toad examined his wristwatch stoically and said, “Gentlemen, this concludes our discussion.”
   Soviet chrononaut Gauki removed his headphones and neck mike and hurried toward the three U.S. tempunauts, his hand extended; he was apparently saying something in Russian, but none of them could understand it. They moved away somberly, clustering close.
   “In my opinion you’re nuts, Addi,” Benz said. “But it would appear that I’m the minority now.”
   “If he is right,” Crayne said, “if—one chance in a billion—if we are going back again and again forever, that would justify it.”
   “Could we go see Merry Lou?” Addison Doug said. “Drive over to her place now?”
   “She’s waiting outside,” Crayne said.
   Striding up to stand beside the three tempunauts, General Toad said, “You know, what made the determination go the way it did was the public reaction to how you, Doug, looked and behaved during the funeral procession. The NSC advisors came to the conclusion that the public would, like you, rather be certain it’s over for all of you. That it’s more of a relief to them to know you’re free of your mission than to save the project and obtain a perfect reentry. I guess you really made a lasting impression on them, Doug. That whining you did.” He walked away, then, leaving the three of them standing there alone.
   “Forget him,” Crayne said to Addison Doug. “Forget everyone like him. We’ve got to do what we have to.”
   “Merry Lou will explain it to me,” Doug said. She would know what to do, what would be right.
   “I’ll go get her,” Crayne said, “and after that the four of us can drive somewhere, maybe to her place, and decide what to do. Okay?”
   “Thank you,” Addison Doug said, nodding; he glanced around for her hopefully, wondering where she was. In the next room, perhaps, somewhere close. “I appreciate that,” he said.
   Benz and Crayne eyed each other. He saw that, but did not know what it meant. He knew only that he needed someone, Merry Lou most of all, to help him understand what the situation was. And what to finalize on to get them out of it.

   Merry Lou drove them north from Los Angeles in the superfast lane of the freeway toward Ventura, and after that inland to Ojai. The four of them said very little. Merry Lou drove well, as always; leaning against her, Addison Doug felt himself relax into a temporary sort of peace.
   “There’s nothing like having a chick drive you,” Crayne said, after many miles had passed in silence.
   “It’s an aristocratic sensation,” Benz murmured. “To have a woman do the driving. Like you’re nobility being chauffeured.”
   Merry Lou said, “Until she runs into something. Some big slow object.”
   Addison Doug said, “When you saw me trudging up to your place… up the redwood round path the other day. What did you think? Tell me honestly.”
   “You looked,” the girl said, “as if you’d done it many times. You looked worn and tired and—ready to die. At the end.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry, but that’s how you looked, Addi. I thought to myself, he knows the way too well.”
   “Like I’d done it too many times.”
   “Yes,” she said.
   “Then you vote for implosion,” Addison Doug said.
   “Well—”
   “Be honest with me,” he said.
   Merry Lou said, “Look in the back seat. The box on the floor.”
   With a flashlight from the glove compartment the three men examined the box. Addison Doug, with fear, saw its contents. VW motor parts, rusty and worn. Still oily.
   “I got them from behind a foreign-car garage near my place,” Merry Lou said. “On the way to Pasadena. The first junk I saw that seemed as if it’d be heavy enough. I had heard them say on TV at launch time that anything over fifty pounds up to—”
   “It’ll do it,” Addison Doug said. “It did do it.”
   “So there’s no point in going to your place,” Crayne said. “It’s decided. We might as well head south toward the module. And initiate the procedure for getting out of ETA. And back to reentry.” His voice was heavy but evenly pitched. “Thanks for your vote, Miss Hawkins.”
   She said, “You are all so tired.”
   “I’m not,” Benz said. “I’m mad. Mad as hell.”
   “At me?” Addison Doug said.
   “I don’t know,” Benz said. “It’s just—Hell.” He lapsed into brooding silence then. Hunched over, baffled and inert. Withdrawn as far as possible from the others in the car.
   At the next freeway junction she turned the car south. A sense of freedom seemed now to fill her, and Addison Doug felt some of the weight, the fatigue, ebbing already.
   On the wrist of each of the three men the emergency alert receiver buzzed its warning tone; they all started.
   “What’s that mean?” Merry Lou said, slowing the car.
   “We’re to contact General Toad by phone as soon as possible,” Crayne said. He pointed. “There’s a Standard Station over there; take the next exit, Miss Hawkins. We can phone in from there.”
   A few minutes later Merry Lou brought her car to a halt beside the outdoor phone booth. “I hope it’s not bad news,” she said.
   “I’ll talk first,” Doug said, getting out. Bad news, he thought with labored amusement. Like what? He crunched stiffly across to the phone booth, entered, shut the door behind him, dropped in a dime and dialed the toll-free number.
   “Well, do I have news!” General Toad said when the operator had put him on the line. “It’s a good thing we got hold of you. Just a minute—I’m going to let Dr. Fein tell you this himself. You’re more apt to believe him than me.” Several clicks, and then Dr. Fein’s reedy, precise, scholarly voice, but intensified by urgency.
   “What’s the bad news?” Addison Doug said.
   “Not bad, necessarily,” Dr. Fein said. “I’ve had computations run since our discussion, and it would appear—by that I mean it is statistically probable but still unverified for a certainty—that you are right, Addison. You are in a closed time loop.”
   Addison Doug exhaled raggedly. You nowhere autocratic mother, he thought. You probably knew all along.
   “However,” Dr. Fein said excitedly, stammering a little, “I also calculate—we jointly do, largely through Cal Tech—that the greatest likelihood of maintaining the loop is to implode on reentry. Do you understand, Addison? If you lug all those rusty VW parts back and implode, then your statistical chances of closing the loop forever is greater than if you simply reenter and all goes well.”
   Addison Doug said nothing.
   “In fact, Addi—and this is the severe part that I have to stress—implosion at reentry, especially a massive, calculated one of the sort we seem to see shaping up—do you grasp all this, Addi? Am I getting through to you? For Chrissake, Addi? Virtually guarantees the locking in of an absolutely unyielding loop such as you’ve got in mind. Such as we’ve all been worried about from the start.” A pause. “Addi? Are you there?”
   Addison Doug said, “I want to die.”
   “That’s your exhaustion from the loop. God knows how many repetitions there’ve been already of the three of you—”
   “No,” he said and started to hang up.
   “Let me speak with Benz and Crayne,” Dr. Fein said rapidly. “Please, before you go ahead with reentry. Especially Benz; I’d like to speak with him in particular. Please, Addison. For their sake; your almost total exhaustion has—”
   He hung up. Left the phone booth, step by step.
   As he climbed back into the car, he heard their two alert receivers still buzzing. “General Toad said the automatic call for us would keep your two receivers doing that for a while,” he said. And shut the car door after him. “Let’s take off.”
   “Doesn’t he want to talk to us?” Benz said.
   Addison Doug said, “General Toad wanted to inform us that they have a little something for us. We’ve been voted a special Congressional Citation for valor or some damn thing like that. A special medal they never voted anyone before. To be awarded posthumously.”
   “Well, hell—that’s about the only way it can be awarded,” Crayne said.
   Merry Lou, as she started up the engine, began to cry.
   “It’ll be a relief,” Crayne said presently, as they returned bumpily to the freeway, “when it’s over.”
   It won’t be long now, Addison Doug’s mind declared.
   On their wrists the emergency alert receivers continued to put out their combined buzzing.
   “They will nibble you to death,” Addison Doug said. “The endless wearing down by various bureaucratic voices.”
   The others in the car turned to gaze at him inquiringly, with uneasiness mixed with perplexity.
   “Yeah,” Crayne said. “These automatic alerts are really a nuisance.” He sounded tired. As tired as I am, Addison Doug thought. And, realizing this, he felt better. It showed how right he was.
   Great drops of water struck the windshield; it had now begun to rain. That pleased him too. It reminded him of that most exalted of all experiences within the shortness of his life: the funeral procession moving slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, the flag-draped caskets. Closing his eyes he leaned back and felt good at last. And heard, all around him once again, the sorrow-bent people. And, in his head, dreamed of the special Congressional Medal. For weariness, he thought. A medal for being tired.
   He saw, in his head, himself in other parades too, and in the deaths of many. But really it was one death and one parade. Slow cars moving along the street in Dallas and with Dr. King as well… He saw himself return again and again, in his closed cycle of life, to the national mourning that he could not and they could not forget. He would be there; they would always be there; it would always be, and every one of them would return together again and again forever. To the place, the moment, they wanted to be. The event which meant the most to all of them.
   This was his gift to them, the people, his country. He had bestowed upon the world a wonderful burden. The dreadful and weary miracle of eternal life.

The Pre-Persons

   Past the grove of cypress trees Walter—he had been playing king of the mountain—saw the white truck, and he knew it for what it was. He thought, That’s the abortion truck. Come to take some kid in for a postpartum down at the abortion place.
   And he thought, Maybe my folks called it. For me.
   He ran and hid among the blackberries, feeling the scratching of the thorns but thinking, It’s better than having the air sucked out of your lungs. That’s how they do it; they perform all the P.P.s on all the kids there at the same time. They have a big room for it. For the kids nobody wants.
   Burrowing deeper into the blackberries, he listened to hear if the truck stopped; he heard its motor.
   “I am invisible,” he said to himself, a line he had learned at the fifth-grade play of Midsummer Night’s Dream, a line Oberon, whom he had played, had said. And after that no one could see him. Maybe that was true now. Maybe the magic saying worked in real life; so he said it again to himself, “I am invisible.” But he knew he was not. He could still see his arms and legs and shoes, and he knew they—everyone, the abortion truck man especially, and his mom and dad—they could see him too. If they looked.
   If it was him they were after this time.
   He wished he was a king; he wished he had magic dust all over him and a shining crown that glistened, and ruled fairyland and had Puck to confide to. To ask for advice from, even. Advice even if he himself was a king and bickered with Titania, his wife.
   I guess, he thought, saying something doesn’t make it true.
   Sun burned down on him and he squinted, but mostly he listened to the abortion truck motor; it kept making its sound, and his heart gathered hope as the sound went on and on. Some other kid, turned over to the abortion clinic, not him; someone up the road.
   He made his difficult exit from the berry brambles shaking and in many places scratched and moved step by step in the direction of his house. And as he trudged he began to cry, mostly from the pain of the scratches but also from fear and relief.
   “Oh, good Lord,” his mother exclaimed, on seeing him. “What in the name of God have you been doing?”
   He said stammeringly, “I—saw—the abortion—truck.”
   “And you thought it was for you?” Mutely, he nodded.
   “Listen, Walter,” Cynthia Best said, kneeling down and taking hold of his trembling hands, “I promise, your dad and I both promise, you’ll never be sent to the County Facility. Anyhow you’re too old. They only take children up to twelve.”
   “But Jeff Vogel—”
   “His parents got him in just before the new law went into effect. They couldn’t take him now, legally. They couldn’t take you now. Look—you have a soul; the law says a twelve-year-old boy has a soul. So he can’t go to the County Facility. See? You’re safe. Whenever you see the abortion truck, it’s for someone else, not you. Never for you. Is that clear? It’s come for another younger child who doesn’t have a soul yet, a pre-person.”
   Staring down, not meeting his mother’s gaze, he said, “I don’t feel like I got a soul; I feel like I always did.”
   “It’s a legal matter,” his mother said briskly. “Strictly according to age. And you’re past the age. The Church of Watchers got Congress to pass the law—actually they, those church people wanted a lower age; they claimed the soul entered the body at three years old, but a compromise bill was put through. The important thing for you is that you are legally safe, however you feel inside; do you see?”
   “Okay,” he said, nodding.
   “You knew that.”
   He burst out with anger and grief, “What do you think it’s like, maybe waiting every day for someone to come and put you in a wire cage in a truck and—”
   “Your fear is irrational,” his mother said.
   “I saw them take Jeff Vogel that day. He was crying, and the man just opened the back of the truck and put him in and shut the back of the truck.”
   “That was two years ago. You’re weak.” His mother glared at him. “Your grandfather would whip you if he saw you now and heard you talk this way. Not your father. He’d just grin and say something stupid. Two years later, and intellectually you know you’re past the legal maximum age! How—” She struggled for the word. “You are being depraved.”
   “And he never came back.”
   “Perhaps someone who wanted a child went inside the County Facility and found him and adopted him. Maybe he’s got a better set of parents who really care for him. They keep them thirty days before they destroy them.” She corrected herself. “Put them to sleep, I mean.”
   He was not reassured. Because he knew “put him to sleep” or “put them to sleep” was a Mafia term. He drew away from his mother, no longer wanting her comfort. She had blown it, as far as he was concerned; she had shown something about herself or, anyhow, the source of what she believed and thought and perhaps did. What all of them did. I know I’m no different, he thought, than two years ago when I was just a little kid; if I have a soul now like the law says, then I had a soul then, or else we have no souls—the only real thing is just a horrible metallic-painted truck with wire over its windows carrying off kids their parents no longer want, parents using an extension of the old abortion law that let them kill an unwanted child before it came out: because it had no “soul” or “identity,” it could be sucked out by a vacuum system in less than two minutes. A doctor could do a hundred a day, and it was legal because the unborn child wasn’t “human.” He was a pre-person. Just like this truck now; they merely set the date forward as to when the soul entered.
   Congress had inaugurated a simple test to determine the approximate age at which the soul entered the body: the ability to formulate higher math like algebra. Up to then, it was only body, animal instincts and body, animal reflexes and responses to stimuli. Like Pavlov’s dogs when they saw a little water seep in under the door of the Leningrad laboratory; they “knew” but were not human.
   I guess I’m human, Walter thought, and looked up into the gray, severe face of his mother, with her hard eyes and rational grimness. I guess I’m like you, he thought. Hey, it’s neat to be a human, he thought; then you don’t have to be afraid of the truck coming.
   “You feel better,” his mother observed. “I’ve lowered your threshold of anxiety.”
   “I’m not so freaked,” Walter said. It was over; the truck had gone and not taken him.
   But it would be back in a few days. It cruised perpetually.
   Anyhow he had a few days. And then the sight of it—if only I didn’t know they suck the air out of the lungs of the kids they have there, he thought. Destroy them that way. Why? Cheaper, his dad had said. Saves the taxpayers money.
   He thought then about taxpayers and what they would look like. Something that scowled at all children, he thought. That did not answer if the child asked them a question. A thin face, lined with watch-worry grooves, eyes always moving. Or maybe fat; one or the other. It was the thin one that scared him; it didn’t enjoy life nor want life to be. It flashed the message, “Die, go away, sicken, don’t exist.” And the abortion truck was proof—or the instrument—of it.
   “Mom,” he said, “how do you shut a County Facility? You know, the abortion clinic where they take the babies and little kids.”
   “You go and petition the county legislature,” his mother said.
   “You know what I’d do?” he said. “I’d wait until there were no kids in there, only county employees, and I’d firebomb it.”
   “Don’t talk like that!” his mother said severely, and he saw on her face the stiff lines of the thin taxpayer. And it frightened him; his own mother frightened him. The cold and opaque eyes mirrored nothing, no soul inside, and he thought, It’s you who don’t have a soul, you and your skinny messages not-to-be. Not us.
   And then he ran outside to play again.

   A bunch more kids had seen the truck; he and they stood around together, talking now and then, but mostly kicking at rocks and dirt, and occasionally stepping on a bad bug.
   “Who’d the truck come for?” Walter said.
   “Fleischhacker. Earl Fleischhacker.”
   “Did they get him?”
   “Sure, didn’t you hear the yelling?”
   “Was his folks home at the time?”
   “Naw, they split earlier on some shuck about ‘taking the car in to be greased.’ ”
   “They called the truck?” Walter said.
   “Sure, it’s the law; it’s gotta be the parents. But they were too chickenshit to be there when the truck drove up. Shit, he really yelled; I guess you’re too far away to hear, but he really yelled.”
   Walter said, “You know what we ought to do? Firebomb the truck and snuff the driver.”
   All the other kids looked at him contemptuously. “They put you in the mental hospital for life if you act out like that.”
   “Sometimes for life,” Pete Bride corrected. “Other times they ‘build up a new personality that is socially viable.’ ”
   “Then what should we do?” Walter said.
   “You’re twelve; you’re safe.”
   “But suppose they change the law.” Anyhow it did not assuage his anxiety to know that he was technically safe; the truck still came for others and still frightened him. He thought of the younger kids down at the Facility now, looking through the Cyclone fence hour by hour, day after day, waiting and marking the passage of time and hoping someone would come in and adopt them.
   “You ever been down there?” he said to Pete Bride. “At the County Facility? All those really little kids, like babies some of them, just maybe a year old. And they don’t even know what’s in store.”
   “The babies get adopted,” Zack Yablonski said. “It’s the old ones that don’t stand a chance. They’re the ones that get you; like, they talk to people who come in and put on a good show, like they’re desirable. But people know they wouldn’t be there if they weren’t—you know, undesirable.”
   “Let the air out of the tires,” Walter said, his mind working.
   “Of the truck? Hey, and you know if you drop a mothball in the gas tank, about a week later the motor wears out. We could do that.”
   Ben Blaire said, “But then they’d be after us.”
   “They’re after us now,” Walter said.
   “I think we ought to firebomb the truck,” Harry Gottlieb said, “but suppose there’re kids in it. It’ll burn them up. The truck picks up maybe—shit, I don’t know. Five kids a day from different parts of the county.”
   “You know they even take dogs too?” Walter said. “And cats; you see the truck for that only about once a month. The pound truck it’s called. Otherwise it’s the same; they put them in a big chamber and suck the air out of their lungs and they die. They’d do that even to animals! Little animals!”
   “I’ll believe that when I see it,” Harry Gottlieb said, derision on his face, and disbelief. “A truck that carries off dogs.”

   He knew it was true, though. Walter had seen the pound truck two different times. Cats, dogs, and mainly us, he thought glumly. I mean, if they’d start with us, it’s natural they’d wind up taking people’s pets, too; we’re not that different. But what kind of a person would do that, even if it is the law? “Some laws are made to be kept, and some to be broken,” he remembered from a book he had read. We ought to firebomb the pound truck first, he thought; that’s the worst, that truck.
   Why is it, he wondered, that the more helpless a creature, the easier it was for some people to snuff it? Like a baby in the womb; the original abortions, “pre-partums,” or “pre-persons” they were called now. How could they defend themselves? Who would speak for them? All those lives, a hundred by each doctor a day… and all helpless and silent and then just dead. The fuckers, he thought. That’s why they do it; they know they can do it; they get off on their macho power. And so a little thing that wanted to see the light of day is vacuumed out in less than two minutes. And the doctor goes on to the next chick.
   There ought to be an organization, he thought, similar to the Mafia. Snuff the snuffers, or something. A contract man walks up to one of those doctors, pulls out a tube, and sucks the doctor into it, where he shrinks down like an unborn baby. An unborn baby doctor, with a stethoscope the size of a pinhead… he laughed, thinking of that.
   Children don’t know. But children know everything, knew too much. The abortion truck, as it drove along, played a Good Humor Man’s jingle:


Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water


   A tape loop in the sound system of the truck, built especially by Ampex for GM, blared that out when it wasn’t actively nearing a seize. Then the driver shut off the sound system and glided along until he found the proper house. However, once he had the unwanted child in the back of the truck, and was either starting back to the County Facility or beginning another pre-person pick-up, he turned back on


Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water


   Thinking of himself, Oscar Ferris, the driver of truck three, finished, “Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.” What the hell’s a crown? Ferris wondered. Probably a private part. He grinned. Probably Jack had been playing with it, or Jill, both of them together. Water, my ass, he thought. I know what they went off into the bushes for. Only, Jack fell down, and his thing broke right off. “Tough luck, Jill,” he said aloud as he expertly drove the four-year-old truck along the winding curves of California Highway One.
   Kids are like that, Ferris thought. Dirty and playing with dirty things, like themselves.
   This was still wild and open country, and many stray children scratched about in the canyons and fields; he kept his eye open, and sure enough—off to his right scampered a small one, about six, trying to get out of sight. Ferris at once pressed the button that activated the siren of the truck. The boy froze, stood in fright, waited as the truck, still playing “Jack and Jill,” coasted up beside him and came to a halt.
   “Show me your D papers,” Ferris said, without getting out of the truck; he leaned one arm out the window, showing his brown uniform and patch; his symbols of authority.
   The boy had a scrawny look, like many strays, but, on the other hand, he wore glasses. Tow-headed, in jeans and T-shirt, he stared up in fright at Ferris, making no move to get out his identification.
   “You got a D card or not?” Ferris said.
   “W-w-w-what’s a ‘D card’?”
   In his official voice, Ferris explained to the boy his rights under the law. “Your parent, either one, or legal guardian, fills out form 36-W, which is a formal statement of desirability. That they or him or her regard you as desirable. You don’t have one? Legally, that makes you a stray, even if you have parents who want to keep you; they are subject to a fine of $500.”
   “Oh,” the boy said. “Well, I lost it.”
   “Then a copy would be on file. They microdot all those documents and records. I’ll take you in—”
   “To the County Facility?” Pipe-cleaner legs wobbled in fear.
   “They have thirty days to claim you by filling out the 36-W form. If they haven’t done it by then—”
   “My mom and dad never agree. Right now I’m staying with my dad.”
   “He didn’t give you a D card to identify yourself with.” Mounted transversely across the cab of the truck was a shotgun. There was always the possibility that trouble might break out when he picked up a stray. Reflexively, Ferris glanced up at it. It was there, all right, a pump shotgun. He had used it only five times in his law-enforcement career. It could blow a man into molecules. “I have to take you in,” he said, opening the truck door and bringing out his keys. “There’s another kid back there; you can keep each other company.”
   “No,” the boy said. “I won’t go.” Blinking, he confronted Ferris, stubborn and rigid as stone.
   “Oh, you probably heard a lot of stories about the County Facility. It’s only the warpies, the creepies, that get put to sleep; any nice normal-looking kid’ll be adopted—we’ll cut your hair and fix you up so you look professionally groomed. We want to find you a home. That’s the whole idea. It’s just a few, those who are—you know—ailing mentally or physically that no one wants. Some well-to-do individual will snap you up in a minute; you’ll see. Then you won’t be running around out here alone with no parents to guide you. You’ll have new parents, and listen—they’ll be paying heavy bread for you; hell, they’ll register you. Do you see? It’s more a temporary lodging place where we’re taking you right now, to make you available to prospective new parents.”
   “But if nobody adopts me in a month—”
   “Hell, you could fall off a cliff here at Big Sur and kill yourself. Don’t worry. The desk at the Facility will contact your blood parents, and most likely they’ll come forth with the Desirability Form (15A) sometime today even. And meanwhile you’ll get a nice ride and meet a lot of new kids. And how often—”
   “No,” the boy said.
   “This is to inform you,” Ferris said, in a different tone, “that I am a County Official.” He opened his truck door, jumped down, showed his gleaming metal badge to the boy. “I am Peace Officer Ferris and I now order you to enter by the rear of the truck.”
   A tall man approached them, walking with wariness; he, like the boy, wore jeans and a T-shirt, but no glasses.
   “You the boy’s father?” Ferris said.
   The man, hoarsely, said, “Are you taking him to the pound?”
   “We consider it a child protection shelter,” Ferris said. “The use of the term ‘pound’ is a radical hippie slur, and distorts—deliberately—the overall picture of what we do.”
   Gesturing toward the truck, the man said, “You’ve got kids locked in there in those cages, have you?”
   “I’d like to see your ID,” Ferris said. “And I’d like to know if you’ve ever been arrested before.”
   “Arrested and found innocent? Or arrested and found guilty?”
   “Answer my question, sir,” Ferris said, showing his black flatpack that he used with adults to identify him as a County Peace Officer. “Who are you? Come on, let’s see your ID.”
   The man said, “Ed Gantro is my name and I have a record. When I was eighteen, I stole four crates of Coca-Cola from a parked truck.”
   “You were apprehended at the scene?”
   “No,” the man said. “When I took the empties back to cash in on the refunds. That’s when they seized me. I served six months.”
   “Have you a Desirability Card for your boy here?” Ferris asked.
   “We couldn’t afford the $90 it cost.”
   “Well, now it’ll cost you five hundred. You should have gotten it in the first place. My suggestion is that you consult an attorney.” Ferris moved toward the boy, declaring officially. “I’d like you to join the other juveniles in the rear section of the vehicle.” To the man he said, “Tell him to do as instructed.”
   The man hesitated and then said. “Tim, get in the goddamn truck. And we’ll get a lawyer; we’ll get the D card for you. It’s futile to make trouble—technically you’re a stray.”
   “ ‘A stray,’ ” the boy said, regarding his father.
   Ferris said, “Exactly right. You have thirty days, you know, to raise the—”
   “Do you also take cats?” the boy said. “Are there any cats in there? I really like cats; they’re all right.”
   “I handle only P.P. cases,” Ferris said. “Such as yourself.” With a key he unlocked the back of the truck. “Try not to relieve yourself while you’re in the truck; it’s hard as hell to get the odor and stains out.”
   The boy did not seem to understand the word; he gazed from Ferris to his father in perplexity.
   “Just don’t go to the bathroom while you’re in the truck,” his father explained. “They want to keep it sanitary, because that cuts down their maintenance costs.” His voice was savage and grim.
   “With stray dogs or cats,” Ferris said, “they just shoot them on sight, or put out poison bait.”
   “Oh, yeah, I know that Warfarin,” the boy’s father said. “The animal eats it over a period of a week, and then he bleeds to death internally.”
   “With no pain,” Ferris pointed out.
   “Isn’t that better than sucking the air from their lungs?” Ed Gantro said. “Suffocating them on a mass basis?”
   “Well, with animals the county authorities—”
   “I mean the children. Like Tim.” His father stood beside him, and they both looked into the rear of the truck. Two dark shapes could be dimly discerned, crouching as far back as possible, in the starkest form of despair.
   “Fleischhacker!” the boy Tim said. “Didn’t you have a D card?”
   “Because of energy and fuel shortages,” Ferris was saying, “population must be radically cut. Or in ten years there’ll be no food for anyone. This is one phase of—“
   “I had a D card,” Earl Fleischhacker said, “but my folks took it away from me. They didn’t want me any more; so they took it back, and then they called for the abortion truck.” His voice croaked; obviously he had been secretly crying.
   “And what’s the difference between a five-month-old fetus and what we have here?” Ferris was saying. “In both cases what you have is an unwanted child. They simply liberalized the laws.”
   Tim’s father, staring at him, said, “Do you agree with these laws?”
   “Well, it’s really all up to Washington and what they decide will solve our needs in these days of crises,” Ferris said. “I only enforce their edicts. If this law changed—hell. I’d be trucking empty milk cartons for recycling or something and be just as happy.”
   “Just as happy? You enjoy your work?”
   Ferris said, mechanically. “It gives me the opportunity to move around a lot and to meet people.”
   Tim’s father Ed Gantro said, “You are insane. This postpartum abortion scheme and the abortion laws before it where the unborn child had no legal rights—it was removed like a tumor. Look what it’s come to. If an unborn child can be killed without due process, why not a born one? What I see in common in both cases is their helplessness; the organism that is killed had no chance, no ability, to protect itself. You know what? I want you to take me in, too. In back of the truck with the three children.”
   “But the President and Congress have declared that when you’re past twelve you have a soul,” Ferris said. “I can’t take you. It wouldn’t be right.”
   “I have no soul,” Tim’s father said. “I got to be twelve and nothing happened. Take me along, too. Unless you can find my soul.”
   “Jeez,” Ferris said.

   “Unless you can show me my soul,” Tim’s father said, “unless you can specifically locate it, then I insist you take me in as no different from these kids.”
   Ferris said, “I’ll have to use the radio to get in touch with the County Facility, see what they say.”
   “You do that,” Tim’s father said, and laboriously clambered up into the rear of the truck, helping Tim along with him. With the other two boys they waited while Peace Officer Ferris, with all his official identification as to who he was, talked on his radio.
   “I have here a Caucasian male, approximately thirty, who insists that he be transported to the County Facility with his infant son,” Ferris was saying into his mike. “He claims to have no soul, which he maintains puts him in the class of subtwelve-year-olds. I don’t have with me or know any test to detect the presence of a soul, at least any I can give out here in the boondocks that’ll later on satisfy a court. I mean, he probably can do algebra and higher math; he seems to possess an intelligent mind. But—”
   “Affirmative as to bringing him in,” his superior’s voice on the two-way radio came back to him. “We’ll deal with him here.”
   “We’re going to deal with you downtown,” Ferris said to Tim’s father, who, with the three smaller figures, was crouched down in the dark recesses of the rear of the truck. Ferris slammed the door, locked it—an extra precaution, since the boys were already netted by electronic bands—and then started up the truck.


Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down
And broke his crown


   Somebody’s sure going to get their crown broke, Ferris thought as he drove along the winding road, and it isn’t going to be me.

   “I can’t do algebra,” he heard Tim’s father saying to the three boys. “So I can’t have a soul.”
   The Fleischhacker boy said, snidely, “I can, but I’m only nine. So what good does it do me?”
   “That’s what I’m going to use as my plea at the Facility,” Tim’s father continued. “Even long division was hard for me. I don’t have a soul. I belong with you three little guys.”
   Ferris, in a loud voice, called back, “I don’t want you soiling the truck, you understand? It costs us—”
   “Don’t tell me,” Tim’s father said, “because I wouldn’t understand. It would be too complex, the proration and accrual and fiscal terms like that.”
   I’ve got a weirdo back there, Ferris thought, and was glad he had the pump shotgun mounted within easy reach. “You know the world is running out of everything,” Ferris called back to them, “energy and apple juice and fuel and bread; we’ve got to keep the population down, and the embolisms from the Pill make it impossible—”
   “None of us knows those big words,” Tim’s father broke in.
   Angrily, and feeling baffled, Ferris said. “Zero population growth; that’s the answer to the energy and food crisis. It’s like—shit, it’s like when they introduced the rabbit in Australia, and it had no natural enemies, and so it multiplied until, like people—”
   “I do understand multiplication,” Tim’s father said. “And adding and subtraction. But that’s all.”
   Four crazy rabbits flopping across the road, Ferris thought. People pollute the natural environment, he thought. What must this part of the country have been like before man? Well, he thought, with the postpartum abortions taking place in every county in the U.S. of A. we may see that day; we may stand and look once again upon a virgin land.
   We, he thought. I guess there won’t be any we. I mean, he thought, giant sentient computers will sweep out the landscape with their slotted video receptors and find it pleasing.
   The thought cheered him up.

   “Let’s have an abortion!” Cynthia declared excitedly as she entered the house with an armload of synthogroceries. “Wouldn’t that be neat? Doesn’t that turn you on?”
   Her husband Ian Best said dryly, “But first you have to get pregnant. So make an appointment with Dr. Guido—that should cost me only fifty or sixty dollars—and have your I.U.D. removed.”
   “I think it’s slipping down anyhow. Maybe, if—” Her pert dark shag-haired head tossed in glee. “It probably hasn’t worked properly since last year. So I could be pregnant now.”
   Ian said caustically. “You could put an ad in the Free Press; ‘Man wanted to fish out I.U.D. with coathanger.’ ”
   “But you see,” Cynthia said, following him as he made his way to the master closet to hang up his status-tie and class-coat, “it’s the in thing now, to have an abortion. Look, what do we have? A kid. We have Walter. Every time someone comes over to visit and sees him, I know they’re wondering. ‘Where did you screw up?’ It’s embarrassing.” She added, “And the kind of abortions they give now, for women in early stages—it only costs one hundred dollars… the price of ten gallons of gas! And you can talk about it with practically everybody who drops by for hours.”
   Ian turned to face her and said in a level voice. “Do you get to keep the embryo? Bring it home in a bottle or sprayed with special luminous paint so it glows in the dark like a night light?”
   “In any color you want!”
   “The embryo?”
   “No, the bottle. And the color of the fluid. It’s in a preservative solution, so really it’s a lifetime acquisition. It even has a written guarantee, I think.”
   Ian folded his arms to keep himself calm: alpha state condition. “Do you know that there are people who would want to have a child? Even an ordinary dumb one? That go to the County Facility week after week looking for a little newborn baby? These ideas—there’s been this world panic about overpopulation. Nine trillion humans stacked like kindling in every block of every city. Okay, if that were going on—” He gestured. “But what we have now is not enough children. Or don’t you watch TV or read the Times?”
   “It’s a drag,” Cynthia said. “For instance, today Walter came into the house freaked out because the abortion truck cruised by. It’s a drag taking care of him. You have it easy; you’re at work. But me–”
   “You know what I’d like to do to the Gestapo abortion wagon? Have two ex-drinking buddies of mine armed with BARs, one on each side of the road. And when the wagon passes by—”
   “It’s a ventilated air-conditioned truck, not a wagon.”
   He glared at her and then went to the bar in the kitchen to fix himself a drink. Scotch will do, he decided. Scotch and milk, a good before-”dinner” drink.
   As he mixed his drink, his son Walter came in. He had, on his face, an unnatural pallor.
   “The ‘bort truck went by today, didn’t it?” Ian said.
   “I thought maybe—”
   “No way. Even if your mother and I saw a lawyer and had a legal document drawn up, an un-D Form, you’re too old. So relax.”
   “I know intellectually,” Walter said, “but—”
   ‘ ‘Do not seek to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,’ ” Ian quoted (inaccurately). “Listen, Walt, let me lay something on you.” He took a big, long drink of Scotch and milk. “The name of all this is, kill me. Kill them when they’re the size of a fingernail, or a baseball, or later on, if you haven’t done it already, suck the air out of the lungs of a ten-year-old boy and let him die. It’s a certain kind of woman advocating this all. They used to call them ‘castrating females.’ Maybe that was once the right term, except that these women, these hard cold women, didn’t just want to—well, they want to do in the whole boy or man, make all of them dead, not just the part that makes him a man. Do you see?”
   “No,” Walter said, but in a dim sense, very frightening, he did.
   After another hit of his drink, Ian said, “And we’ve got one living right here, Walter. Here in our very house.”
   “What do we have living here?”
   “What the Swiss psychiatrists call a kindermorder,” Ian said, deliberately choosing a term he knew his boy wouldn’t understand. “You know what,” he said, “you and I could get onto an Amtrak coach and head north and just keep on going until we reached Vancouver, British Columbia, and we could take a ferry to Vancouver Island and never be seen by anybody down here again.”
   “But what about Mom?”
   “I would send her a cashier’s check,” Ian said. “Each month. And she would be quite happy with that.”
   “It’s cold up there, isn’t it?” Walter said. “I mean, they have hardly any fuel and they wear—”
   “About like San Francisco. Why? Are you afraid of wearing a lot of sweaters and sitting close to the fireplace? What did you see today that frightened you a hell of a lot more?”
   “Oh, yeah.” He nodded somberly.
   “We could live on a little island off Vancouver Island and raise our own food. You can plant stuff up there and it grows. And the truck won’t come there; you’ll never see it again. They have different laws. The women up there are different. There was this one girl I knew when I was up there for a while, a long time ago; she had long black hair and smoked Players cigarettes all the time and never ate anything or ever stopped talking. Down here we’re seeing a civilization in which the desire by women to destroy their own—” Ian broke off; his wife had walked into the kitchen.
   “If you drink any more of that stuff,” she said to him, “you’ll barf it up.”
   “Okay,” Ian said irritably. “Okay!”
   “And don’t yell,” Cynthia said. “I thought for dinner tonight it’d be nice if you took us out. Dal Key’s said on TV they have steak for early comers.”
   Wrinkling his nose, Walter said, “They have raw oysters.”
   “Blue points,” Cynthia said. “In the half shell, on ice. I love them. All right, Ian? Is it decided?”
   To his son Walter, Ian said. “A raw blue point oyster looks like nothing more on earth than what the surgeon—” He became silent, then. Cynthia glared at him, and his son was puzzled. “Okay,” he said, “but I get to order steak.”
   “Me too,” Walter said.
   Finishing his drink, Ian said more quietly, “When was the last time you fixed dinner here in the house? For the three of us?”
   “I fixed you that pigs’ ears and rice dish on Friday,” Cynthia said. “Most of which went to waste because it was something new and on the nonmandatory list. Remember, dear?”
   Ignoring her, Ian said to his son, “Of course, that type of woman will sometimes, even often, be found up there, too. She has existed throughout time and all cultures. But since Canada has no law permitting postpartum—” He broke off. “It’s the carton of milk talking,” he explained to Cynthia. “They adulterate it these days with sulfur. Pay no attention or sue somebody; the choice is yours.”
   Cynthia, eyeing him, said, “Are you running a fantasy number in your head again about splitting?”
   “Both of us,” Walter broke in. “Dad’s taking me with him.”
   “Where?” Cynthia said, casually.
   Ian said. “Wherever the Amtrak track leads us.”
   “We’re going to Vancouver Island in Canada,” Walter said.
   “Oh, really?” Cynthia said.
   After a pause Ian said, “Really.”
   “And what the shit am I supposed to do when you’re gone? Peddle my ass down at the local bar? How’ll I meet the payments on the various—”
   “I will continually mail you checks,” Ian said. “Bonded by giant banks.”
   “Sure. You bet. Yep. Right.”
   “You could come along,” Ian said, “and catch fish by leaping into English Bay and grinding them to death with your sharp teeth. You could rid British Columbia of its fish population overnight. All those ground-up fish, wondering vaguely what happened… swimming along one minute and then this—ogre, this fish-destroying monster with a single luminous eye in the center of its forehead, falls on them and grinds them into grit. There would soon be a legend. News like that spreads. At least among the last surviving fish.”
   “Yeah, but Dad,” Walter said, “suppose there are no surviving fish.”
   “Then it will have been all in vain,” Ian said, “except for your mother’s own personal pleasure at having bitten to death an entire species in British Columbia, where fishing is the largest industry anyhow, and so many other species depend on it for survival.”
   “But then everyone in British Columbia will be out of work,” Walter said.
   “No,” Ian said, “they will be cramming the dead fish into cans to sell to Americans. You see, Walter, in the olden days, before your mother multi-toothedly bit to death all the fish in British Columbia, the simple rustics stood with stick in hand, and when a fish swam past, they whacked the fish over the head. This will create jobs, not eliminate them. Millions of cans of suitably marked—”
   “You know,” Cynthia said quickly, “he believes what you tell him.”
   Ian said, “What I tell him is true.” Although not, he realized, in a literal sense. To his wife he said, “I’ll take you out to dinner. Get our ration stamps, put on that blue knit blouse that shows off your boobs; that way you’ll get a lot of attention and maybe they won’t remember to collect the stamps.”
   “What’s a ‘boob’?” Walter asked.
   “Something fast becoming obsolete,” Ian said, “like the Pontiac GTO. Except as an ornament to be admired and squeezed. Its function is dying away.” As is our race, he thought, once we gave full rein to those who would destroy the unborn—in other words, the most helpless creatures alive.
   “A boob,” Cynthia said severely to her son, “is a mammary gland that ladies possess which provides milk to their young.”
   “Generally there are two of them,” Ian said. “Your operational boob and then your backup boob, in case there is powerful failure in the operational one. I suggest the elimination of a step in all this pre-person abortion mania,” he said. “We will send all the boobs in the world to the County Facilities. The milk, if any, will be sucked out of them, by mechanical means of course; they will become useless and empty, and then the young will die naturally, deprived of any and all sources of nourishment.”
   “There’s formula,” Cynthia said, witheringly. “Similac and those. I’m going to change so we can go out.” She turned and strode toward their bedroom.
   “You know,” Ian said after her, “if there was any way you could get me classified as a pre-person, you’d send me there. To the Facility with the greatest facility.” And, he thought, I’ll bet I wouldn’t be the only husband in California who went. There’d be plenty others. In the same bag as me, then as now.
   “Sounds like a plan,” Cynthia’s voice came to him dimly; she had heard.
   “It’s not just a hatred for the helpless,” Ian Best said. “More is involved. Hatred of what? Of everything that grows?” You blight them, he thought, before they grow big enough to have muscle and the tactics and skill for fight—big like I am in relation to you, with my fully developed musculature and weight. So much easier when the other person—I should say pre-person—is floating and dreaming in the amniotic fluid and knows nothing about how to nor the need to hit back.
   Where did the motherly virtues go to? he asked himself. When mothers especially protected what was small and weak and defenseless?
   Our competitive society, he decided. The survival of the strong. Not the fit, he thought; just those who hold the power. And are not going to surrender it to the next generation: it is the powerful and evil old against the helpless and gentle new.
   “Dad,” Walter said, “are we really going to Vancouver Island in Canada and raise real food and not have anything to be afraid of any more?”
   Half to himself, Ian said, “Soon as I have the money.”
   “I know what that means. It’s a ‘we’ll see’ number you say. We aren’t going, are we?” He watched his father’s face intently. “She won’t let us, like taking me out of school and like that; she always brings up that… right?”
   “It lies ahead for us someday,” Ian said doggedly. “Maybe not this month but someday, sometime. I promise.”
   “And there’s no abortion trucks there.”
   “No. None. Canadian law is different.”
   “Make it soon, Dad. Please.”
   His father fixed himself a second Scotch and milk and did not answer; his face was somber and unhappy, almost as if he was about to cry.

   In the rear of the abortion truck three children and one adult huddled, jostled by the turning of the truck. They fell against the restraining wire that separated them, and Tim Gantro’s father felt keen despair at being cut off mechanically from his own boy. A nightmare during day, he thought. Caged like animals; his noble gesture had brought only more suffering to him.
   “Why’d you say you don’t know algebra?” Tim asked, once. “I know you know even calculus and trig-something; you went to Stanford University.”
   “I want to show,” he said, “that either they ought to kill all of us or none of us. But not divide along these bureaucratic arbitrary lines. ‘When does the soul enter the body?’ What kind of rational question is that in this day and age? It’s Medieval.” In fact, he thought, it’s a pretext—a pretext to prey on the helpless. And he was not helpless. The abortion truck had picked up a fully grown man, with all his knowledge, all his cunning. How are they going to handle me? he asked himself. Obviously I have what all men have; if they have souls, then so do I. If not, then I don’t, but on what real basis can they “put me to sleep”? I am not weak and small, not an ignorant child cowering defenselessly. I can argue the sophistries with the best of the county lawyers; with the D.A. himself, if necessary.
   If they snuff me, he thought, they will have to snuff everyone, including themselves. And that is not what this is all about. This is a con game by which the established, those who already hold all the key economic and political posts, keep the youngsters out of it—murder them if necessary. There is, he thought, in the land, a hatred by the old of the young, a hatred and a fear. So what will they do with me? I am in their age group, and I am caged up in the back of this abortion truck. I pose, he thought, a different kind of threat; I am one of them but on the other side, with stray dogs and cats and babies and infants. Let them figure it out; let a new St. Thomas Aquinas arise who can unravel this.
   “All I know,” he said aloud, “is dividing and multiplying and subtracting. I’m even hazy on my fractions.”
   “But you used to know that!” Tim said.
   “Funny how you forget it after you leave school,” Ed Gantro said. “You kids are probably better at it than I am.”
   “Dad, they’re going to snuff you,” his son Tim said, wildly. “Nobody’ll adopt you. Not at your age. You’re too old.”
   “Let’s see,” Ed Gantro said. “The binomial theorem. How does that go? I can’t get it all together: something about a and b.” And as it leaked out of his head, as had his immortal soul… he chuckled to himself. I cannot pass the soul test, he thought. At least not talking like that. I am a dog in the gutter, an animal in a ditch.
   The whole mistake of the pro-abortion people from the start, he said to himself, was the arbitrary line they drew. An embryo is not entitled to American Constitutional rights and can be killed, legally, by a doctor. But a fetus was a “person,” with rights, at least for a while; and then the pro-abortion crowd decided that even a seven-month fetus was not “human” and could be killed, legally, by a licensed doctor. And, one day, a newborn baby—it is a vegetable; it can’t focus its eyes, it understands nothing, nor talks… the pro-abortion lobby argued in court, and won, with their contention that a newborn baby was only a fetus expelled by accident or organic processes from the womb. But, even then, where was the line to be drawn finally? When the baby smiled its first smile? When it spoke its first word or reached for its initial time for a toy it enjoyed? The legal line was relentlessly pushed back and back. And now the most savage and arbitrary definition of all: when it could perform “higher math.”
   That made the ancient Greeks, of Plato’s time, nonhumans, since arithmetic was unknown to them, only geometry; and algebra was an Arab invention, much later in history. Arbitrary. It was not a theological arbitrariness either; it was a mere legal one. The Church had long since—from the start, in fact—maintained that even the zygote, and the embryo that followed, was as sacred a life form as any that walked the earth. They had seen what would come of arbitrary definitions of “Now the soul enters the body,” or in modern terms, “Now it is a person entitled to the full protection of the law like everyone else.” What was so sad was the sight now of the small child playing bravely in his yard day by day, trying to hope, trying to pretend a security he did not have.
   Well, he thought, we’ll see what they do with me; I am thirty-five years old, with a Master’s Degree from Stanford. Will they put me in a cage for thirty days, with a plastic food dish and a water source and a place—in plain sight—to relieve myself, and if no one adopts me will they consign me to automatic death along with the others?
   I am risking a lot, he thought. But they picked up my son today, and the risk began then, when they had him, not when I stepped forward and became a victim myself.
   He looked about at the three frightened boys and tried to think of something to tell them—not just his own son but all three.
   “ ‘Look,’ ” he said, quoting. “ ‘I tell you a sacred secret. We shall not all sleep in death. We shall—’ ” But then he could not remember the rest. Bummer, he thought dismally. “ ‘We shall wake up,’ ” he said, doing the best he could. “ ‘In a flash. In the twinkling of an eye.’ ”
   “Cut the noise,” the driver of the truck, from beyond his wire mesh, growled. “I can’t concentrate on this fucking road.” He added, “You know, I can squirt gas back there where you are, and you’ll pass out; it’s for obstreperous pre-persons we pick up. So you want to knock it off, or have me punch the gas button?”
   “We won’t say anything,” Tim said quickly, with a look of mute terrified appeal at his father. Urging him silently to conform.
   His father said nothing. The glance of urgent pleading was too much for him, and he capitulated. Anyhow, he reasoned, what happened in the truck was not crucial. It was when they reached the County Facility—where there would be, at the first sign of trouble, newspaper and TV reporters.
   So they rode in silence, each with his own fears, his own schemes. Ed Gantro brooded to himself, perfecting in his head what he would do—what he had to do. And not just for Tim but all the P.P. abortion candidates; he thought through the ramifications as the truck lurched and rattled on.

   As soon as the truck parked in the restricted lot of the County Facility and its rear doors had been swung open, Sam B. Carpenter, who ran the whole goddamn operation, walked over, stared, said, “You’ve got a grown man in there, Ferris. In fact, you comprehend what you’ve got? A protester, that’s what you’ve latched onto.”
   “But he insisted he doesn’t know any math higher than adding,” Ferris said.
   To Ed Gantro, Carpenter said, “Hand me your wallet. I want your actual name. Social Security number, police region stability ident—come on, I want to know who you really are.”
   “He’s just a rural type,” Ferris said, as he watched Gantro pass over his lumpy wallet.
   “And I want confirm prints offa his feet,” Carpenter said. “The full set. Right away—priority A.” He liked to talk that way.
   An hour later he had the reports back from the jungle of interlocking security-data computers from the fake-pastoral restricted area in Virginia. “This individual graduated from Stanford College with a degree in math. And then got a master’s in psychology, which he has, no doubt about it, been subjecting us to. We’ve got to get him out of here.”
   “I did have a soul,” Gantro said, “but I lost it.”
   “How?” Carpenter demanded, seeing nothing about that on Gantro’s official records.
   “An embolism. The portion of my cerebral cortex, where my soul was, got destroyed when I accidentally inhaled the vapors of insect spray. That’s why I’ve been living out in the country eating roots and grubs, with my boy here, Tim.”
   “We’ll run an EEG on you,” Carpenter said.
   “What’s that?” Gantro said. “One of those brain tests?”
   To Ferris, Carpenter said. “The law says the soul enters at twelve years. And you bring this individual male adult well over thirty. We could be charged with murder. We’ve got to get rid of him. You drive him back to exactly where you found him and dump him off. If he won’t voluntarily exit from the truck, gas the shit out of him and then throw him out. That’s a national security order. Your job depends on it, also your status with the penal code of this state.”
   “I belong here,” Ed Gantro said. “I’m a dummy.”
   “And his kid,” Carpenter said. “He’s probably a mathematical mental mutant like you see on TV. They set you up; they’ve probably already alerted the media. Take them all back and gas them and dump them wherever you found them or, barring that, anyhow out of sight.”
   “You’re getting hysterical,” Ferris said, with anger. “Run the EEG and the brain scan on Gantro, and probably we’ll have to release him, but these three juveniles—”
   “All genuises,” Carpenter said. “All part of the setup, only you’re too stupid to know. Kick them out of the truck and off our premises, and deny—you get this?—deny you ever picked any of the four of them up. Stick to that story.”
   “Out of the vehicle,” Ferris ordered, pressing the button that lifted the wire mesh gates.
   The three boys scrambled out. But Ed Gantro remained.
   “He’s not going to exit voluntarily,” Carpenter said. “Okay, Gantro, we’ll physically expel you.” He nodded to Ferris, and the two of them entered the back of the truck. A moment later they had deposited Ed Gantro on the pavement of the parking lot.
   “Now you’re just a plain citizen,” Carpenter said, with relief. “You can claim all you want, but you have no proof.”
   “Dad,” Tim said, “how are we going to get home?” All three boys clustered around Ed Gantro.
   “You could call somebody from up there,” the Fleischhacker boy said. “I bet if Walter Best’s dad has enough gas he’d come and get us. He takes a lot of long drives; he has a special coupon.”
   “Him and his wife, Mrs. Best, quarrel a lot,” Tim said. “So he likes to go driving at night alone; I mean, without her.”
   Ed Gantro said, “I’m staying here. I want to be locked up in a cage.”
   “But we can go,” Tim protested. Urgently, he plucked at his dad’s sleeve. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? They let us go when they saw you. We did it!”
   Ed Gantro said to Carpenter, “I insist on being locked up with the other pre-persons you have in there.” He pointed at the gaily imposing, esthetic solid-green-painted Facility Building.
   To Mr. Sam B. Carpenter, Tim said, “Call Mr. Best, out where we were, on the peninsula. It’s a 669 prefix number. Tell him to come and get us, and he will. I promise. Please.”
   The Fleischhacker boy added, “There’s only one Mr. Best listed in the phone book with a 669 number. Please, mister.”
   Carpenter went indoors, to one of the Facility’s many official phones, looked up the number. Ian Best. He punched the number.
   “You have reached a semiworking, semiloafing number,” a man’s voice, obviously that of someone half-drunk, responded. In the background Carpenter could hear the cutting tones of a furious woman, excoriating Ian Best.
   “Mr. Best,” Carpenter said, “several persons whom you know are stranded down at Fourth and A Streets in Verde Gabriel, an Ed Gantro and his son, Tim, a boy identified as Ronald or Donald Fleischhacker, and another unidentified minor boy. The Gantro boy suggested you would not object to driving down here to pick them up and take them home.”
   “Fourth and A Streets,” Ian Best said. A pause. “Is that the pound?”
   “The County Facility,” Carpenter said.
   “You son of a bitch,” Best said. “Sure I’ll come get them; expect me in twenty minutes. You have Ed Gantro there as a pre-person? Do you know he graduated from Stanford University?”
   “We are aware of this,” Carpenter said stonily. “But they are not being detained; they are merely—here. Not—I repeat not—in custody.”
   Ian Best, the drunken slur gone from his voice, said, “There’ll be reporters from all the media there before I get there.” Click. He had hung up.
   Walking back outside, Carpenter said to the boy Tim, “Well, it seems you mickey-moused me into notifying a rabid anti-abortionist activist of your presence here. How neat, how really neat.”
   A few moments passed, and then a bright-red Mazda sped up to the entrance of the Facility. A tall man with a light beard got out, unwound camera and audio gear, walked leisurely over to Carpenter. “I understand you may have a Stanford MA in math here at the Facility,” he said in a neutral, casual voice. “Could I interview him for a possible story?”
   Carpenter said, “We have booked no such person. You can inspect our records.” But the reporter was already gazing at the three boys clustered around Ed Gantro.
   In a loud voice the reporter called, “Mr. Gantro?”
   “Yes, sir,” Ed Gantro replied.
   Christ, Carpenter thought. We did lock him in one of our official vehicles and transport him here; it’ll hit all the papers. Already a blue van with the markings of a TV station had rolled onto the lot. And, behind it, two more cars.


Abortion Facility Snuffs
Stanford Grad

   That was how it read in Carpenter’s mind. Or


County Abortion Facility
Foiled in Illegal Attempt to…

   And so forth. A spot on the 6:00 evening TV news. Gantro, and when he showed up, Ian Best who was probably an attorney, surrounded by tape recorders and mikes and video cameras.
   We have mortally fucked up, he thought. Mortally fucked up. They at Sacramento will cut our appropriation; we’ll be reduced to hunting down stray dogs and cats again, like before. Bummer.

   When Ian Best arrived in his coal-burning Mercedes-Benz, he was still a little stoned. To Ed Gantro he said, “You mind if we take a scenic roundabout route back?”
   “By way of what?” Ed Gantro said. He wearily wanted to leave now. The little flow of media people had interviewed him and gone. He had made his point, and now he felt drained, and he wanted to go home.
   Ian Best said, “By way of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.”
   With a smile, Ed Gantro said, “These kids should go right to bed. My kid and the other two. Hell, they haven’t even had any dinner.”
   “We’ll stop at a McDonald’s stand,” Ian Best said. “And then we can take off for Canada, where the fish are, and lots of mountains that still have snow on them, even this time of year.”
   “Sure,” Gantro said, grinning. “We can go there.”
   “You want to?” Ian Best scrutinized him. “You really want to?”
   “I’ll settle a few things, and then, sure, you and I can take off together.”
   “Son of a bitch,” Best breathed. “You mean it.”
   “Yes,” he said. “I do. Of course, I have to get my wife’s agreement. You can’t go to Canada unless your wife signs a document in writing where she won’t follow you. You become what’s called a ‘landed Immigrant.’ ”
   “Then I’ve got to get Cynthia’s written permission.”
   “She’ll give it to you. Just agree to send support money.”
   “You think she will? She’ll let me go?”
   “Of course,” Gantro said.
   “You actually think our wives will let us go,” Ian Best said as he and Gantro herded the children into the Mercedes-Benz. “I’ll bet you’re right; Cynthia’d love to get rid of me. You know what she calls me, right in front of Walter? ‘An aggressive coward,’ and stuff like that. She has no respect for me.”
   “Our wives,” Gantro said, “will let us go.” But he knew better.
   He looked back at the Facility manager, Mr. Sam B. Carpenter, and at the truck driver, Ferris, who, Carpenter had told the press and TV, was as of this date fired and was a new and inexperienced employee anyhow.
   “No,” he said. “They won’t let us go. None of them will.”
   Clumsily, Ian Best fiddled with the complex mechanism that controlled the funky coal-burning engine. “Sure they’ll let us go; look, they’re just standing there. What can they do, after what you said on TV and what that one reporter wrote up for a feature story?”
   “I don’t mean them,” Gantro said tonelessly.
   “We could just run.”
   “We are caught,” Gantro said. “Caught and can’t get out. You ask Cynthia, though. It’s worth a try.”
   “We’ll never see Vancouver Island and the great ocean-going ferries steaming in and out of the fog, will we?” Ian Best said.
   “Sure we will, eventually.” But he knew it was a lie, an absolute lie, just like you know sometimes when you say something that for no rational reason you know is absolutely true.
   They drove from the lot, out onto the public street.
   “It feels good,” Ian Best said, “to be free… right?” The three boys nodded, but Ed Gantro said nothing. Free, he thought. Free to go home. To be caught in a larger net, shoved into a greater truck than the metal mechanical one the County Facility uses.
   “This is a great day,” Ian Best said.
   “Yes,” Ed Gantro agreed. “A great day in which a noble and effective blow has been struck for all helpless things, anything of which you could say, ‘It is alive.’ ”
   Regarding him intently in the narrow trickly light, Ian Best said, “I don’t want to go home; I want to take off for Canada now.”
   “We have to go home,” Ed Gantro reminded him. “Temporarily, I mean. To wind things up. Legal matters, pick up what we need.”
   Ian Best, as he drove, said, “We’ll never get there, to British Columbia and Vancouver Island and Stanley Park and English Bay and where they grow food and keep horses and where they have the ocean-going ferries.”
   “No, we won’t,” Ed Gantro said.
   “Not now, not even later?”
   “Not ever,” Ed Gantro said.
   “That’s what I was afraid of,” Best said and his voice broke and his driving got funny. “That’s what I thought from the beginning.”
   They drove in silence, then, with nothing to say to each other. There was nothing left to say.

The Eye of the Sibyl

   How is it that our ancient Roman Republic guards itself against those who would destroy it? We Romans, although only mortals like other mortals, draw on the help of beings enormously superior to ourselves. These wise and kind entities, who originate from worlds unknown to us, are ready to assist the Republic when it is in peril. When it is not in peril, they sink back out of sight—to return when we need them.
   Take the case of the assassination of Julius Caesar: a case which apparently was closed when those who conspired to murder him were themselves murdered. But how did we Romans determine who had done this foul deed? And, more important, how did we bring these conspirators to justice? We had outside help; we had the assistance of the Cumean Sibyl who knows a thousand years ahead what will happen, and who gives us, in written form, her advice. All Romans are aware of the existence of the Sibylline Books. We open them whenever the need arises.
   I myself, Philos Diktos of Tyana, have seen the Sibylline Books. Many leading Roman citizens, members of the Senate especially, have consulted them. But I have seen the Sibyl herself, and I of my own experience know something about her which few men know. Now that I am old—regretfully, but of the necessity which binds all mortal men—I am willing to confess that once, quite by accident I suppose, I in the course of my priestly duties saw how the Sibyl is capable of seeing down the corridors of time; I know what permits her to do this, as she developed out of the prior Greek Sibyl at Delphi, in that so highly venerated land, Greece.
   Few men know this, and perhaps the Sibyl, reaching out through time to strike at me for speaking aloud, will silence me forever. It is quite possible, therefore, that before I can finish this scroll I will be found dead, my head split like one of those overripe melons from the Levant which we Romans prize so. In any case, being old, I will boldly say.
   I had been quarreling with my wife that morning—I was not old then, and the dreadful murder of Julius Caesar had just taken place. At that time no one was sure who had done it. Treason against the State! Murder most ugly—a thousand knife wounds in the body of the man who had come to stabilize our quaking society… with the approval of the Sibyl, in her temple; we had seen the texts she had written to that effect. We knew that she had expected Caesar to bring his army across the river and into Rome, and to accept the crown of Caesar.
   “You witless fool,” my wife was saying to me that morning. “If the Sibyl were so wise as you think, she would have anticipated this assassination.”
   “Maybe she did,” I answered.
   “I think she’s a fake,” my wife Xantippe said to me, grimacing in that way she has, which is so repulsive. She is—I should say was—of a higher social class than I, and always made me conscious of it. “You priests make up those texts; you write them yourselves—you say what you think in such a vague way that any interpretation can be made of it. You’re bilking the citizens, especially the well-to-do.” By that she meant her own family.
   I said hotly, leaping up from the breakfast table, “She is inspired; she is a prophetess—she knows the future. Evidently there was no way the assassination of our great leader, whom the people loved so, could be averted.”
   “The Sibyl is a hoax,” my wife said, and started buttering yet another roll, in her usual greedy fashion.
   “I have seen the great books—”
   “How does she know the future?” my wife demanded. At that I had to admit I didn’t know; I was crestfallen—I, a priest at Cumae, an employee of the Roman State. I felt humiliated.
   “It’s a money game,” my wife was saying as I strode out the door. Even though it was only dawn—fair Aurora, the goddess of dawn, was showing that white light over the world, the light we regard as sacred, from which many of our inspired visions come—I made my way, on foot, to the lovely temple where I work.
   No one else had arrived yet, except the armed guards loitering outside; they glanced at me in surprise to see me so early, then nodded as they recognized me. No one but a recognized priest of the temple at Cumae is allowed in; even Caesar himself must depend on us.
   Entering, I passed by the great gas-filled vault in which the Sibyl’s huge stone throne shone wetly in the half-gloom; only a few meager torches had been lit…
   I halted and froze into silence, as I saw something never disclosed to me before. The Sibyl, her long black hair tied up in a tight knot, her arms covered, sat on her throne, leaning forward—and I saw, then, that she was not alone.
   Two creatures stood before her, inside a round bubble. They resembled men but each of them had an additional—I am not sure even now what they had, but they were not mortals. They were gods. They had slits for eyes, without pupils. Instead of hands, they had claws like a crab has. Their mouths were only holes, and I realized that they, gods forbid, were mute. They seemed to be talking to the Sibyl but over a long string, at each end of which was a box. One of the creatures held the box to the side of his head, and the Sibyl listened to the box at her end. The box had numbers on it and buttons, and the string was in rolls and heaps, so that it could be extended.
   These were the Immortals. But we Romans, we mortals, had believed that all the Immortals had left the world, a long time ago. That was what we had been told. Evidently they had returned—at least for a short while, and to give information to the Sibyl.
   The Sibyl turned toward me, and, incredibly, her head came across that whole gas-filled chamber until it was close to mine. She was smiling, but she had found me out. Now I could hear the conversation between her and the Immortals; she graciously made it audible to me.
   “…only one of many,” the larger of the two Immortals was saying. “More will follow, but not for some time. The darkness of ignorance is coming, after a golden period.”
   “There is no way it can be averted?” the Sibyl asked, in that melodious voice of hers which we treasure so.
   “Augustus will reign well,” the larger Immortal said, “but following him evil and deranged men will come.”
   The other Immortal said, “You must understand that a new cult will arise around a Light Creature. The cult will grow, but their true texts will be encoded, and the actual messages lost. We foresee failure for the mission of the Light Creature; he will be tortured and murdered, as was Julius. And after that—”
   “Long after that,” the larger Immortal said, “civilization will draw itself up out of the ignorance once more, after two thousand years, and then—”
   The Sibyl gasped and said, “That long, Fathers?”
   “That long. And then as they begin to question and to seek to learn their true origins, their divinity, the murders will begin again, the repression and cruelty, and another dark age will begin.”
   “It might be averted,” the other Immortal said.
   “Can I assist?” the Sibyl asked.
   Gently, both Immortals said, “You will be dead by then.”
   “There will be no sibyl to take my place?”
   “None. No one will guard the Republic two thousand years from now. And filthy men with small ideas will scamper and scrabble about like rats; their footprints will crisscross the world as they seek power and vie with one another for false honors.” To the Sibyl both Immortals said, “You will not be able to help the people, then.”
   Abruptly both Immortals vanished, along with their rolls of string and the boxes with numbers which talked and were talked into, as if by mind alone. The Sibyl sat for a moment, and then lifted her hands so that by means of the mechanism which the Egyptians taught us, one of the blank pages lifted toward her, that she might write. But then she did a curious thing, and it is this which I tell you with fear, more fear than what I have told already.
   Reaching into the folds of her robe she brought out an Eye. She placed the eye in the center of her forehead, and it was not an eye at all such as ours, with a pupil, but like that, the slit-like eye of the Immortals, and yet not. It had sideways bands which moved toward one another, like rows… I have no words for this, being only a priest by formal training and class, but the Sibyl did turn toward me and look past me with that Eye, and she did then cry out so loud that it shook the walls of the temple; stones fell and the snakes far down in the slots of rock hissed. She cried in dismay and horror at what she saw, past me, and yet her strange third eye remained; she continued to look.
   And then she fell, as if faint. I ran forward to lend a hand; I touched the Sibyl, my friend, that great lovely friend of the Republic as she fell faint and forward in dismay at what she saw ahead, down the tunnels and corridors of time. For it was this Eye by which the Sibyl saw what she needed to see, to instruct and warn us. And it was evident to me that sometimes she saw things too dreadful for her to bear, and for us to handle, try as we might.
   As I held the Sibyl, a strange thing happened. I saw, amid the swirling gases, forms take shape.
   “You must not take them as real,” the Sibyl said; I heard her voice, and yet although I understood her words I knew that the shapes were indeed real. I saw a giant ship, without sails or oars… I saw a city of thin, high buildings, crowded with vehicles unlike anything I had ever seen. And still I moved toward them and they toward me, until at last the shapes swirled behind me, cutting me off from the Sibyl. “I see this with the Gorgon’s Eye,” the Sibyl called after me. “It is the Eye which Medusas passed back and forth, the eye of the fates—you have fallen into—” And then her words were gone.

   I played in grass with a puppy, wondering about a broken Coca-Cola bottle which had been left in our backyard; I didn’t know by whom.
   “Philip, you come in for dinner!” my grandmother called from the back porch. I saw that the sun was setting.
   “Okay!” I called back. But I continued to play. I had found a great spider web, and in it was a bee wrapped up in web, stung by the spider. I began to unwrap it, and it stung me.
   My next memory was reading the comic pages in the Berkeley Daily Gazette. I read about Brick Bradford and how he found a lost civilization from thousands of years ago.
   “Hey, Mom,” I said to my mother. “Look at this; it’s swell. Brick walks down this ledge, see, and at the bottom—” I kept staring at the olden-times helmets the people wore, and a strange feeling filled me; I didn’t know why.
   “He certainly gets a lot out of the funnies,” my grandmother said in a disgusted voice. “He should read something worthwhile. Those comics are garbage.”
   The next I remember I was in school, sitting watching a girl dance. Her name was Jill and she was from the grade above ours, the sixth; she wore a belly dancer’s costume and her veil covered the bottom part of her face. But I could see lovely kind eyes, eyes filled with wisdom. They reminded me of someone else’s eyes I had once known, but who has a kid ever known? Later Mrs. Redman had us write a composition, and I wrote about Jill. I wrote about strange lands where Jill lived where she danced with nothing on above her waist. Later, Mrs. Redman talked to my mother on the phone and I was bawled out, but in obscure terms that had to do with a bra or something. I never understood it then; there was a lot I didn’t understand. I seemed to have memories, and yet they had nothing to do with growing up in Berkeley at the Hillside Grammar School, or my family, or the house we lived in… they had to do with snakes. I know now why I dreamed of snakes: wise snakes, not evil snakes but those which whisper wisdom.
   Anyhow, my composition was considered very good by the principal of the school, Mr. Bill Gaines, after I wrote in that Jill wore something above her waist at all times, and later I decided to be a writer.
   One night I had an odd dream. I was maybe in junior high school, getting ready to go to Berkeley High next year. I dreamed that in the deep of night—and it was like a regular dream, it was really real—I saw this person from outer space behind glass in a satellite of some kind they’d come here in. And he couldn’t talk; he just looked at me, with funny eyes.
   Two weeks or so later I had to fill out what I wanted to be when I grew up and I thought of my dream about the man from another universe, so I wrote:


   I AM GOING TO BE A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER.


   That made my family mad, but then, see, when they got mad I got stubborn, and anyhow my girlfriend, Ysabel Lomax, told me I’d never be any good at it and it didn’t earn any money anyhow and science fiction was dumb and only people with pimples read it. So I decided for sure to write it, because people with pimples should have someone writing for them; it’s unfair otherwise, just to write for people with clear complexions. America is built on fairness; that is what Mr. Gaines taught us at Hillside Grammar School, and since he was able to fix my wristwatch that time when no one else could, I tend to admire him.
   In high school I was a failure because I just sat writing and writing all day, and all my teachers screamed at me that I was a Communist because I didn’t do what I was told.
   “Oh yeah?” I used to say. That got me sent up before the Dean of Boys. He told me off worse than my grandfather had, and warned me that if I didn’t get better grades I’d be expelled.
   That night I had another one of those vivid dreams. This time a woman was driving me in her car, only it was like an old-time Roman style chariot, and she was singing.
   The next day when I had to go see Mr. Erlaud, the Dean of Boys, I wrote on his blackboard, in Latin:


UBI Pecunia Regnet

   When he came in he turned red in the face, since he teaches Latin and knows that means, “Where money rules.”
   “This is what a left-wing complainer would write,” he said to me. So I wrote something else as he sat looking over my papers; I wrote:


UBI Cunnus Regnet

   That seemed to perplex him. “Where—did you learn that particular Latin word?” he asked.
   “I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me that in my dreams they were talking to me in Latin. Maybe it was just my own brain doing reruns of my Latin 1-A beginners class, where I was really very good, surprisingly, because I didn’t study.
   The next vivid dream like that came two nights before that freak or those freaks killed President Kennedy. I saw the whole thing happening in my dream, two nights before, but more than anything else, even more vivid, I saw my girlfriend Ysabel Lomax watching the conspirators doing their evil deed, and Ysabel had a third eye.
   My folks sent me to a psychologist later on, because after President Kennedy was assassinated I got really weird. I just sat and brooded and withdrew. It was a neat lady they sent me to, a Carol Heims. She was very pretty and she didn’t say I was nuts; she said I should get away from my family, drop out of school—she said that the school system insulates you from reality and keeps you from learning techniques to handle actual situations—and for me to write science fiction.
   I did so. I worked at a TV sales shop sweeping up and uncrating and setting up the new TV sets. I kept thinking that each set was like a huge eye, though; it bothered me. I told Carol Heims my dreams that I had been having all my life, about the space people, and being in Latin, and that I thought I’d had a lot more I’d never remembered when I woke up.
   “Dreams aren’t fully understood,” Ms. Heims told me. I was sitting there wondering how she would look in a belly dancer costume, nude above the waist; I found that made the therapy hour go faster. “There’s a new theory that it’s part of your collective unconscious, reaching back perhaps thousands of years… and in dreams you get in touch with it. So, if that’s true, dreams are valid and very valuable.”
   I was busy imagining her hips moving suggestively from side to side, but I did listen to what she said; it was something about the wise kindness of her eyes. Always I thought of those wise snakes, for some reason.
   “I’ve been dreaming about books,” I told her. “Open books, held up before me. Huge books, very valuable. Even holy, like the Bible.”
   “That has to do with your career as a writer,” Ms. Heims said.
   “These are old. Thousands of years old. And they’re warning us about something. A dreadful murder, a lot of murders. And cops putting people into prison for their ideas, but doing it secretly—framing people. And I keep seeing this woman who looks like you but seated on a vast stone throne.”
   Later on Ms. Heims was transferred to another part of the county and I couldn’t see her any more. I felt really bad, and I buried myself in my writing. I sold a story to a magazine called Envigorating Science Fact, which told about superior races who had landed on Earth and were directing our affairs secretly. They never paid me.
   I am old now, and I risk telling this, because what do I have to lose? One day I got a request to write a small article for Love-Planet Adventure Yarns,and they gave me a plot they wanted written up, and a black-and-white photo of the cover. I kept staring at the photo; it showed a Roman or Greek—anyhow he wore a toga—and he had on his wrist a caduceus, which is the medical sign: two coiled snakes, only actually it was olive branches originally.
   “How do you know that’s called a ‘caduceus’?” Ysabel asked me (we were living together now, and she was always telling me to make more money and to be like her family, which was well-to-do and classy).
   “I don’t know,” I said, and I felt funny. And then I began to see violently agitated colored phosphene activity in both my eyes, like those modern abstract graphics which Paul Klee and others draw—in vivid color, and flash-cut in duration: very fast. “What’s the date?” I yelled at Ysabel, who was sitting drying her hair and reading the Harvard Lampoon.
   “The date? It’s March 16,” she said.
   “The year!”I yelled. “Pulchra puella, tempus—” And then I broke off, because she was staring at me. And, worse, I couldn’t recall her name or who she was.
   “It is 1974,” she answered.
   “The tyranny is in power, then, if it is only 1974,” I said.
   “What?” she answered, astonished, staring at me.
   At once two beings appeared on each side of her, encapsulated in their inter-system vessels, two globes which hovered and maintained their atmosphere and temperature. “Don’t say a further statement to her,” one of them warned me. “We will erase her memory; she will think she fell asleep and had a dream.”
   “I remember,” I said, pressing my hands to my head. Anamnesis had taken place; I remember that I was from ancient times, and, before that, from the star Albemuth, as were these two Immortals. “Why are you back?” I said. “To—”
   “We shall work entirely through ordinary mortals,” J’Annis said. He was the wiser of the two Immortals. “There is no Sibyl now to help, to give advice to the Republic. In dreams we are inspiring people here and there to wake up; they are beginning to understand that the Price of Release is being paid by us to free them from the Liar, who rules them.”
   “They’re not aware of you?” I said.
   “They suspect. They see holograms of us projected in the sky, which we employ to divert them; they imagine that we are floating about there.”
   I knew that these Immortals were in the minds of men, not in the skies of Earth, that by diverting attention outward, they were free once more to help inward, as they had always helped: the inner World.
   “We will bring the springtime to this winter world,” F’fr’am said, smiling. “We will raise the gates which imprison these people, who groan under a tyranny they dimly see. Did you see? Did you know of the comings-and-goings of the secret police, the quasi-military teams which destroyed all freedom of speech, all those who dissented?”

   Now, in my old age, I set forth this account for you, my Roman friends, here at Cumae, where the Sibyl lives. I passed either by chance or by design into the far future, into a world of tyranny, of winter, which you cannot imagine. And I saw the Immortals which assist us also assist those, two thousand years from now! Although those mortals in the future are—listen to me—blind. Their sight has been taken away by a thousand years of repression; they have been tormented and limited, the way we limit animals. But the Immortals are waking them up—will wake them up, I should say, in time to save them. And then the two thousand years of winter will end; they will open their eyes, because of dreams and secret inspirations; they will know—but I have told you all this, in my ancient, rambling fashion.
   Let me finish with this verse by our great poet Virgil, a good friend of the Sibyl, and you will know from it what lies ahead, for the Sibyl has said that although it will not apply to our time here in Rome, it will apply to those two thousand years from us, ahead in time, bringing them promise of relief:


   “Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;
   magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
   Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;
   Iam nova progenies, caelo demittitur alto.
   Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum
   desinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,
   casta fave Lucina; tuus iam regnat Apollo.”


   I will set this in the strange English language which I learned to speak during my time in the future, before the Immortals and the Sibyl drew me back here, my work there at that time done:


   “At last the Final Time announced by the Sibyl will arrive:
   The procession of ages turns to its origin.
   The Virgin returns and Saturn reigns as before;
   A new race from heaven on high descends.
   Goddess of Birth, smile on the new-born baby,
   In whose time the Iron Prison will fall to ruin
   And a golden race arises everywhere.
   Apollo, the rightful king, is restored!”


   Alas, you my dear Roman friends will not live to see this. But far along the corridors of time, in the United States (I use here words foreign to you) evil will fall, and this little prophecy of Virgil, which the Sibyl inspired in him, will come true. The Springtime is reborn!

The Day Mr. Computer Fell out of its Tree

   He awoke, and sensed at once that something dreadful was wrong. Oh God, he thought as he realized that Mr. Bed had deposited him in a muddled heap against the wall. It’s beginning again, he realized. And the Directorate West promised us infinite perfection. This is what we get, he realized, for believing in what mere humans say.
   As best he could he struggled out of his bedclothes, got shakily to his feet and made his way across the room to Mr. Closet.
   “I’d like a natty sharkskin gray double-breasted suit,” he informed it, speaking crisply into the microphone on Mr. Closet’s door. “A red shirt, blue socks, and—” But it was no use. Already the slot was vibrating as a huge pair of women’s silk bloomers came sliding out.
   “You get what you see,” Mr. Closet’s metallic voice came to him, echoing hollowly.
   Glumly, Joe Contemptible put on the bloomers. At least it was better than nothing—like the day in Dreadful August when the vast polyencephalic computer in Queens had served up everyone in Greater America nothing but a handkerchief to wear.
   Going to the bathroom, Joe Contemptible washed his face—and found the liquid which he was splashing on himself to be warm root beer. Christ, he thought. Mr. Computer is even zanier this time than ever before. It’s been reading old Phil Dick science fiction stories, he decided. That’s what we get for providing Mr. Computer with every kind of archaic trash in the world to read and store in its memory banks.
   He finished combing his hair—without making use of the root beer—and then, having dried himself, entered the kitchen to see if Mr. Coffeepot was at least a sane fragment in a reality deteriorating all around him.
   No luck. Mr. Coffeepot obligingly presented him with a dixie cup of soap. Well, so much for that.
   The real problem, however, came when he tried to open Mr. Door. Mr. Door would not open; instead it complained tinnily: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
   “Meaning what?” Joe demanded, angry, now. This weird business was no longer fun. Not that it had ever been the times before—except, perhaps, when Mr. Computer had served him with roast pheasant for breakfast.
   “Meaning,” Mr. Door said, “that you’re wasting your time, fucker. You’re not getting to the office today nohow.”

   This proved to be true. The door would not open; despite his efforts the mechanism, controlled miles away from the polyencephalic master matrix, refused to budge.
   Breakfast, then? Joe Contemptible punched buttons on the control module of Mr. Food—and found himself staring at a plate of fertilizer.
   He thereupon picked up the phone and savagely attacked the numbers which would put him in touch with the local police.
   “Loony Tunes Incorporated,” the face on the vidscreen said. “An animated cartoon version of your sexual practices produced in one week, including GLORIOUS SOUND EFFECTS!”
   Fuck it, Joe Contemptible said to himself and rang off.
   It had been a bad idea from the start, back in 1982, to operate every mechanism from a central source. Of course, the basic idea had sounded good: with the ozone layer burned off, too many people were behaving irrationally, and it had become necessary to solve the problem by some electronic means immune from the mind-slushing ultra violet radiation now flooding earth. Mr. Computer had, at the time, seemed to be the answer. But, sad to say, Mr. Computer had absorbed too much freaked-out input from its human builders and therefore, like them, Mr. Computer had its own psychotic episodes.
   There was of course an answer. It had hurriedly been slapped together—pasted into place, as it were, once the difficulty was discovered. The head of World Mental Health, a formidable old battleax named Joan Simpson, had been granted a form of immortality so as to be always available to treat Mr. Computer during its crazy periods. Ms. Simpson was stored at the center of the earth in a special lead-lined chamber, safe from the harmful radiation at the surface, in a quasi-suspended animation called Dismal Pak, in which Ms. Simpson (it was said) lay aslumber while being entertained by an endless procession of priceless 1940 radio soap operas, fed to her on a closed loop. Ms. Simpson, it was said, was the only truly sane person on—or rather in—earth; this, plus her superb skill, as well as infinite training in the art of healing psychotic constructs, was earth’s sole hope for survival.
   Realizing this, Joe Contemptible felt a little better, but not a lot—for he had just picked up Mr. Newspaper where it lay on the floor beside the slot of his front door. The headline read:


ADOLF HITLER CROWNED POPE.
CROWDS CHEER IN RECORD NUMBERS.

   So much for Mr. Newspaper, Joe realized glumly, and tossed it into Mr. Garbage-slot. The mechanism churned, and then, instead of ingesting or cubing the newspaper, spat it back out again. Joe glanced briefly at the headline again, saw a photo of a human skeleton—complete with Nazi uniform and mustache, wearing the great crown of the pope—and seated himself on the couch in his living room to wait for the moment (sure to come soon) when Ms. Simpson was startled out of Dismal Pak to minister to Mr. Computer, and, in so doing, restore the world to sanity.

   Half to himself, Fred Doubledome said, “It’s psychotic, all right. I asked it if it knew where it was and it said it was floating on a raft in the Mississippi. Now get a confirm for me; ask it who it is.”
   Dr. Pacemaker touched command-request buttons on the console of the vast computer, asking it: WHO ARE YOU?
   The answer appeared on the vidscreen at once.


TOM SAWYER

   “You see?” Doubledome said. “It is totally out of touch with the reality situation. Has reactivation of Ms. Simpson begun?”
   “That’s affirmative, Doubledome,” Pacemaker said. And, as if proving him correct, doors slid aside to reveal the lead-lined container in which Ms. Simpson slept, listening to her favorite daytime soap opera, Ma Perkins.
   “Ms. Simpson,” Pacemaker said, bending over her. “We are having a problem with Mr. Computer again. It has totally spaced out. An hour ago it routed all the whipples in New York across the same intersection. Loss of life was heavy. And instead of responding to the disaster with fire and police rescue teams it dispatched a circus troop of clowns.”
   “I see,” Ms. Simpson’s voice came through the transduction and boosting system by which they communicated with her. “But first, I must attend to a fire at Ma’s lumber yard. You see, her friend Shuffle—”
   “Ms. Simpson,” Pacemaker said, “our situation is grave. We need you. Come out of your customary fog and get to work restoring Mr. Computer to sanity. Then you may return to your radio serials.”
   Gazing down at Ms. Simpson he was, as always, startled by her virtually unnatural beauty. Great dark eyes with long lashes, the husky, sensuous voice, the intensely black short-cropped hair (so fashionable in a world of dreck!), the firm and supple body, the warm mouth suggesting love and comfort—amazing, he thought, that the one really sane human left on earth (and the only one capable of saving same) could at the same time be startlingly lovely.
   But no matter; this was not the time to think such thoughts. NBC TV news had already reported that Mr. Computer had closed down all the airports in the world and turned them into baseball stadiums.
   Shortly, Ms. Simpson was studying a composite abstract delineating Mr. Computer’s erratic commands.
   “It is clearly regressive,” she informed them, sipping absently at a cup of coffee.
   “Ms. Simpson,” Doubledome said, “I’m afraid that’s soapy water you’re drinking.”
   “You’re right,” Ms. Simpson said, putting the cup down. “I see here that Mr. Computer is playing childish pranks on the mass of mankind. It fits with my hypostatized hypothesis.”
   “How will you render a return of normalcy to the vast construct?” Pacemaker asked.
   “Evidently it encountered a traumatic situation which caused it to regress,” Ms. Simpson said. “I shall locate the trauma and then proceed by desensitizing Mr. Computer vis-à-vis that trauma. My M.O. in that regard will be to present Mr. Computer with each letter of the alphabet in turn, gauging its reactions until I perceive what we in the mental health movement call a flinch reaction.”
   She did so. Mr. Computer, upon the letter J, emitted a faint whine; smoke billowed up. Ms. Simpson then repeated the sequence of letters. This time the faint whine and billows of smoke came at the letter C.
   “J.C.,” Ms. Simpson said. “Perhaps Jesus Christ. Perhaps the Second Coming has taken place, and Mr. Computer fears that it will be pre-empted. I will start on that assumption. Have Mr. Computer placed in a semi-comatose state so that it can free associate.”
   Technicians hurried to the task assigned.
   The virtually unconscious mumbling of the great computer issued forth from the aud channels mounted through the control chamber.
   “…programming himself to die,” the computer rambled on. “Fine person like that. DNA command analysis. Going to ask not for a reprieve but for an acceleration of the death process. Salmon swimming upstream to die… appeals to him… after all I’ve done for him. Rejection of life. Conscious of it. Wants to die. I cannot endure the voluntary death, the reprogramming 180 degrees from the matrix purpose of DNA command programming…” On and on it rambled.
   Ms. Simpson said sharply, “What name comes to you, Mr. Computer? A name!”
   “Clerk in a record store,” the computer mumbled. “An authority on German Lieder and bubblegum rock of the ‘60s. What a waste. My but the water is warm. Think I’ll fish. Let down my line and catch a big catfish. Won’t Huck be surprised, and Jim, too! Jim’s a man even though—”
   “What name?” Ms. Simpson repeated.
   The vague mumble continued.
   Swiftly, Ms. Simpson said to Doubledome and Pacemaker, who stood rigid and attentive, “Find a record clerk whose initials are J.C. and who is an authority on German Lieder and bubblegum rock of the ‘60s. And hurry! We don’t have much time!’’

   Having left his conapt by a window, Joe Contemptible made his way among wrecked whipples and shouting, angry drivers in the direction of Artistic Music Company, the record store at which he had worked most of his life. At least he had gotten out of—
   Suddenly two gray-clad police materialized before him, faces grim; both held punch-guns aimed at Joe’s chest. “You’re coming with us,” they said, virtually in unison.
   The urge to run overcame Joe; turning, he started away. But then furious pain settled over him; the police had punched him out, and now, falling, he realized that it was too late to flee. He was a captive of the authorities. But why? he wondered. Is it merely a random sweep? Or are they putting down an abortive coup against the government? Or—his fading thoughts raced—have ETIs come at last to help us in our fight for freedom? And then darkness closed over him, merciful darkness.
   The next he knew, he was being served a cup of soapy water by two members of the technocrat class; an armed policeman lounged in the background, punch-gun ready were the situation to require it.
   Seated in the corner of the chamber was an extraordinarily beautiful dark-haired woman; she wore a miniskirt and boots—old-fashioned but enticingly foxy—and, he saw, she had the most enormous and warm eyes he had ever seen in his life. Who was she? And—what did she want with him? Why had he been brought before her?
   “Your name,” one of the white-clad technocrats said.
   “Contemptible,” he managed to say, unable to take his eyes off the extraordinarily beautiful young woman.
   “You have an appointment with DNA Reappraisal,” the other of the white-clad technocrats said crisply. “What is your purpose? What ukase emanating from the gene pool do you intend—did you intend, I should say—to alter?”
   Joe said lamely, “I—wanted to be reprogrammed for… you know. Longer life. The encoding for death was about to come up for me, and I—”
   “We know that isn’t true,” the lovely dark-haired woman said in a husky, sexy voice, but a voice nonetheless filled with intelligence and authority. “You were attempting suicide, were you not, Mr. Contemptible, by having your DNA coding tinkered with, not to postpone your death, but to bring it on?”
   He said nothing. Obviously, they knew.
   “WHY?” the woman said sharply.
   “I—” He hesitated. Then, slumping in defeat he managed to say, “I’m not married. I’ve got no wife. Nothing. Just my damn job at the record store. All those damn German songs and those bubblegum rock lyrics; they go through my head night and day, constantly, mixtures of Goethe and Heine and Neil Diamond.” Lifting his head he said with furious defiance, “So why should I live on? Call that living? It’s existence, not living.”
   There was silence.
   Three frogs hopped across the floor. Mr. Computer was now turning out frogs from all the airducts on earth. Half an hour before, it had been dead cats.
   “Do you know what it is like,” Joe said quietly, “to have such lyrics as ‘The song I sang to you / The love I brang to you’ keep floating through your head?”
   The dark-haired lovely woman said, suddenly, “I think I do know, Contemptible. You see, I am Joan Simpson.”
   “Then—” Joe understood in an instant. “You’re down there at the center of the earth watching endless daytime soap operas! On a closed loop!”
   “Not watching,” Joan Simpson said. “Hearing. They’re from radio, not TV.”
   Joe said nothing. There was nothing to say.
   One of the white-clad technocrats said, “Ms. Simpson, work must begin restoring Mr. Computer to sanity. It is presently turning out hundreds of thousands of Pollys.”
   “ ‘Pollys’?” Joan Simpson said, puzzled; then understanding flooded her warm features. “Oh yes. His childhood sweetheart.”
   “Mr. Contemptible,” one of the white-clad technocrats said to Joe, “it is because of your lack of love for life that Mr. Computer has gone crackers. To bring Mr. Computer back to sanity we must first bring you back to sanity.” To Joan Simpson, he said, “Am I correct?”
   She nodded, lit a cigarette, leaned back thoughtfully. “Well?” she said presently. “What would it take to reprogram you, Joe? So you’d want to live instead of die? Mr. Computer’s abreactive syndrome is directly related to your own. Mr. Computer feels it has failed the world because, in examining a cross index of humans whom it cares for, it has found that you—”
   “ ‘Cares for’?” Joe Contemptible said. “You mean Mr. Computer likes me?”
   “Takes care of,” one of the white-clad technocrats explained.
   “Wait.” Joan Simpson scrutinized Joe Contemptible. “You reacted to that phrase ‘cares for.’ What did you think it meant?”
   He said, with difficulty, “Likes me. Cares for in that sense.”
   “Let me ask you this,” Joan Simpson said, presently, stubbing out her cigarette and lighting another. “Do you feel that no one cares for you, Joe?”
   “That’s what my mother said,” Joe Contemptible said.
   “And you believed her?” Joan Simpson said.
   “Yes.” He nodded.
   Suddenly Joan Simpson put out her cigarette. “Well, Doubledome,” she said in a quiet, brisk voice. “There aren’t going to be any more radio soap operas nattering at me any more. I’m not going back down to the center of the earth. It’s over, gentlemen. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
   “You’re going to leave Mr. Computer insane as—”
   “I will heal Mr. Computer,” Joan Simpson said in an even voice, “by healing Joe. And—” A slight smile played about her lips. “And myself, gentlemen.”
   There was silence.
   “All right,” one of the two white-clad technicians said presently. “We will send you both down to the center of the earth. And you can rattle on at each other throughout eternity. Except when it is necessary to lift you out of Dismal Pak to heal Mr. Computer. Is that a fair trade-off?”
   “Wait,” Joe Contemptible said feebly, but already Ms. Simpson was nodding.
   “It is,” she said.
   “What about my conapt?” Joe protested. “My job? My wretched little pointless life as I am normally accustomed to living it?”
   Joan Simpson said, “That is already changing, Joe. You have already encountered me.”
   “But I thought you would be old and ugly!” Joe said. “I had no idea—”
   “The universe is full of surprises,” Joan Simpson said, and held out her waiting arms for him.

The Exit Door Leads In

   Bob Bibleman had the impression that robots wouldn’t look you in the eye. And when one had been in the vicinity small valuable objects disappeared. A robot’s idea of order was to stack everything into one pile. Nonetheless, Bibleman had to order lunch from robots, since vending ranked too low on the wage scale to attract humans.
   “A hamburger, fries, strawberry shake, and—” Bibleman paused, reading the printout. “Make that a supreme double cheeseburger, fries, a chocolate malt—”
   “Wait a minute,” the robot said. “I’m already working on the burger. You want to buy into this week’s contest while you’re waiting?”
   “I don’t get the royal cheeseburger,” Bibleman said.
   “That’s right.”
   It was hell living in the twenty-first century. Information transfer had reached the velocity of light. Bibleman’s older brother had once fed a ten-word plot outline into a robot fiction machine, changed his mind as to the outcome, and found that the novel was already in print. He had had to program a sequel in order to make his correction.
   “What’s the prize structure in the contest?” Bibleman asked.
   At once the printout posted all the odds, from first prize down to last. Naturally, the robot blanked out the display before Bibleman could read it.
   “What is first prize?” Bibleman said.
   “I can’t tell you that,” the robot said. From its slot came a hamburger, french fries, and a strawberry shake. “That’ll be one thousand dollars in cash.”
   “Give me a hint,” Bibleman said as he paid.
   “It’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s existed since the seventeenth century. Originally it was invisible. Then it became royal. You can’t get it unless you’re smart, although cheating helps and so does being rich. What does the word ‘heavy’ suggest to you?”
   “Profound.”
   “No, the literal meaning.”
   “Mass.” Bibleman pondered. “What is this, a contest to see who can figure out what the prize is? I give up.”
   “Pay the six dollars,” the robot said, “to cover our costs, and you’ll receive an—”
   “Gravity,” Bibleman broke in. “Sir Isaac Newton. The Royal College of England. Am I right?”
   “Right,” the robot said. “Six dollars entitles you to a chance to go to college—a statistical chance, at the posted odds. What’s six dollars? Prat-fare.”
   Bibleman handed over a six-dollar coin.
   “You win,” the robot said. “You get to go to college. You beat the odds, which were two trillion to one against. Let me be the first to congratulate you. If I had a hand, I’d shake hands with you. This will change your life. This has been your lucky day.”
   “It’s a setup,” Bibleman said, feeling a rush of anxiety.
   “You’re right,” the robot said, and it looked Bibleman right in the eye. “It’s also mandatory that you accept your prize. The college is a military college located in Buttfuck, Egypt, so to speak. But that’s no problem; you’ll be taken there. Go home and start packing.”
   “Can’t I eat my hamburger and drink—”
   “I’d suggest you start packing right away.”
   Behind Bibleman a man and woman had lined up; reflexively he got out of their way, trying to hold on to his tray of food, feeling dizzy.
   “A charbroiled steak sandwich,” the man said, “onion rings, root beer, and that’s it.”
   The robot said, “Care to buy into the contest? Terrific prizes.” It flashed the odds on its display panel.

   When Bob Bibleman unlocked the door of his one-room apartment, his telephone was on. It was looking for him.
   “There you are,” the telephone said.
   “I’m not going to do it,” Bibleman said.
   “Sure you are,” the phone said. “Do you know who this is? Read over your certificate, your first-prize legal form. You hold the rank of shavetail. I’m Major Casals. You’re under my jurisdiction. If I tell you to piss purple, you’ll piss purple. How soon can you be on a transplan rocket? Do you have friends you want to say goodbye to? A sweetheart, perhaps? Your mother?”
   “Am I coming back?” Bibleman said with anger. “I mean, who are we fighting, this college? For that matter, what college is it? Who is on the faculty? Is it a liberal arts college or does it specialize in the hard sciences? Is it government-sponsored? Does it offer—”
   “Just calm down,” Major Casals said quietly.
   Bibleman seated himself. He discovered that his hands were shaking. To himself he thought, I was born in the wrong century. A hundred years ago this wouldn’t have happened and a hundred years from now it will be illegal. What I need is a lawyer.
   His life had been a quiet one. He had, over the years, advanced to the modest position of floating-home salesman. For a man twenty-two years old, that wasn’t bad. He almost owned his one-room apartment; that is, he rented with an option to buy. It was a small life, as lives went; he did not ask too much and he did not complain—normally—at what he received. Although he did not understand the tax structure that cut through his income, he accepted it; he accepted a modified state of penury the same way he accepted it when a girl would not go to bed with him. In a sense this defined him; this was his measure. He submitted to what he did not like, and he regarded this attitude as a virtue. Most people in authority over him considered him a good person. As to those over whom he had authority, that was a class with zero members. His boss at Cloud Nine Homes told him what to do and his customers, really, told him what to do. The government told everyone what to do, or so he assumed. He had very few dealings with the government. That was neither a virtue nor a vice; it was simply good luck.
   Once he had experienced vague dreams. They had to do with giving to the poor. In high school he had read Charles Dickens and a vivid idea of the oppressed had fixed itself in his mind to the point where he could see them: all those who did not have a one-room apartment and a job and a high school education. Certain vague place names had floated through his head, gleaned from TV, places like India, where heavy-duty machinery swept up the dying. Once a teaching machine had told him, You have a good heart. That amazed him—not that a machine would say so, but that it would say it to him. A girl had told him the same thing. He marveled at this. Vast forces colluding to tell him that he was not a bad person! It was a mystery and a delight.
   But those days had passed. He no longer read novels, and the girl had been transferred to Frankfurt. Now he had been set up by a robot, a cheap machine, to shovel shit in the boonies, dragooned by a mechanical scam that was probably pulling citizens off the streets in record numbers. This was not a college he was going to; he had won nothing. He had won a stint at some kind of forced-labor camp, most likely. The exit door leads in, he thought to himself. Which is to say, when they want you they already have you; all they need is the paperwork. And a computer can process the forms at the touch of a key. The H key for hell and the S key for slave, he thought. And the Y key for you.
   Don’t forget your toothbrush, he thought. You may need it.
   On the phone screen Major Casals regarded him, as if silently estimating the chances that Bob Bibleman might bolt. Two trillion to one I will, Bibleman thought. But the one will win, as in the contest; I’ll do what I’m told.
   “Please,” Bibleman said, “let me ask you one thing, and give me an honest answer.”
   “Of course,” Major Casals said.
   “If I hadn’t gone up to that Earl’s Senior robot and—”
   “We’d have gotten you anyhow,” Major Casals said.
   “Okay,” Bibleman said, nodding. “Thanks. It makes me feel better. I don’t have to tell myself stupid stuff like, If only I hadn’t felt like a hamburger and fries. If only—” He broke off. “I’d better pack.”
   Major Casals said, “We’ve been running an evaluation on you for several months. You’re overly endowed for the kind of work you do. And undereducated. You need more education. You’re entitled to more education.”
   Astonished, Bibleman said, “You’re talking about it as if it’s a genuine college!”
   “It is. It’s the finest in the system. It isn’t advertised; something like this can’t be. No one selects it; the college selects you. Those were not joke odds that you saw posted. You can’t really imagine being admitted to the finest college in the system by this method, can you, Mr. Bibleman? You have a lot to learn.”
   “How long will I be at the college?” Bibleman said.
   Major Casals said, “Until you have learned.”

   They gave him a physical, a haircut, a uniform, and a place to bunk down, and many psychological tests. Bibleman suspected that the true purpose of the tests was to determine if he were a latent homosexual, and then he suspected that his suspicions indicated that he was a latent homosexual, so he abandoned the suspicions and supposed instead that they were sly intelligence and aptitude tests, and he informed himself that he was showing both: intelligence and aptitude. He also informed himself that he looked great in his uniform, even though it was the same uniform that everyone else wore. That is why they call it a uniform, he reminded himself as he sat on the edge of his bunk reading his orientation pamphlets.
   The first pamphlet pointed out that it was a great honor to be admitted to the College. That was its name—the one word. How strange, he thought, puzzled. It’s like naming your cat Cat and your dog Dog. This is my mother, Mrs. Mother, and my father, Mr. Father. Are these people working right? he wondered. It had been a phobia of his for years that someday he would fall into the hands of madmen—in particular, madmen who seemed sane up until the last moment. To Bibleman this was the essence of horror.
   As he sat scrutinizing the pamphlets, a red-haired girl, wearing the College uniform, came over and seated herself beside him. She seemed perplexed.
   “Maybe you can help me,” she said. “What is a syllabus? It says here that we’ll be given a syllabus. This place is screwing up my head.”
   Bibleman said, “We’ve been dragooned off the streets to shovel shit.”
   “You think so?”
   “I know so.”
   “Can’t we just leave?”
   “You leave first,” Bibleman said. “And I’ll wait and see what happens to you.”
   The girl laughed. “I guess you don’t know what a syllabus is.”
   “Sure I do. It’s an abstract of courses or topics.”
   “Yes, and pigs can whistle.”
   He regarded her. The girl regarded him.
   “We’re going to be here forever,” the girl said.
   Her name, she told him, was Mary Lorne. She was, he decided, pretty, wistful, afraid, and putting up a good front. Together they joined the other new students for a showing of a recent Herbie the Hyena cartoon which Bibleman had seen; it was the episode in which Herbie attempted to assassinate the Russian monk Rasputin. In his usual fashion, Herbie the Hyena poisoned his victim, shot him, blew him up six times, stabbed him, tied him up with chains and sank him in the Volga, tore him apart with wild horses, and finally shot him to the moon strapped to a rocket. The cartoon bored Bibleman. He did not give a damn about Herbie the Hyena or Russian history and he wondered if this was a sample of the College’s level of pedagogy. He could imagine Herbie the Hyena illustrating Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle. Herbie—in Bibleman’s mind—chased after by a subatomic particle fruitlessly, the particle bobbing up at random here and there… Herbie making wild swings at it with a hammer; then a whole flock of subatomic particles jeering at Herbie, who was doomed as always to fuck up.
   “What are you thinking about?” Mary whispered to him.
   The cartoon ended; the hall lights came on. There stood Major Casals on the stage, larger than on the phone. The fun is over, Bibleman said to himself. He could not imagine Major Casals chasing subatomic particles fruitlessly with wild swings of a sledgehammer. He felt himself grow cold and grim and a little afraid.
   The lecture had to do with classified information. Behind Major Casals a giant hologram lit up with a schematic diagram of a homeostatic drilling rig. Within the hologram the rig rotated so that they could see it from all angles. Different stages of the rig’s interior glowed in various colors.
   “I asked what you were thinking,” Mary whispered.
   “We have to listen,” Bibleman said quietly.
   Mary said, equally quietly, “It finds titanium ore on its own. Big deal. Titanium is the ninth most abundant element in the crust of the planet. I’d be impressed if it could seek out and mine pure wurtzite, which is found only at Potosi, Bolivia; Butte, Montana; and Goldfield, Nevada.”
   “Why is that?” Bibleman said.
   “Because,” Mary said, “wurtzite is unstable at temperatures below one thousand degrees centigrade. And further—” She broke off. Major Casals had ceased talking and was looking at her.
   “Would you repeat that for all of us, young woman?” Major Casals said.
   Standing, Mary said, “Wurtzite is unstable at temperatures below one thousand degrees centigrade.” Her voice was steady.
   Immediately the hologram behind Major Casals switched to a readout of data on zinc-sulfide minerals.
   “I don’t see ‘wurtzite’ listed,” Major Casals said.
   “It’s given on the chart in its inverted form,” Mary said, her arms folded. “Which is sphalerite. Correctly, it is ZnS, of the sulfide group of the AX type. It’s related to greenockite.”
   “Sit down,” Major Casals said. The readout within the hologram now showed the characteristics of greenockite.
   As she seated herself, Mary said, “I’m right. They don’t have a homeostatic drilling rig for wurtzite because there is no—”
   “Your name is?” Major Casals said, pen and pad poised.
   “Mary Wurtz.” Her voice was totally without emotion. “My father was Charles-Adolphe Wurtz.”
   “The discoverer of wurtzite?” Major Casals said uncertainly; his pen wavered.
   “That’s right,” Mary said. Turning toward Bibleman, she winked.
   “Thank you for the information,” Major Casals said. He made a motion and the hologram now showed a flying buttress and, in comparison to it, a normal buttress.
   “My point,” Major Casals said, “is simply that certain information such as architectural principles of long-standing—”
   “Most architectural principles are long-standing,” Mary said.
   Major Casals paused.
   “Otherwise they’d serve no purpose,” Mary said.
   “Why not?” Major Casals said, and then he colored.
   Several uniformed students laughed.
   “Information of that type,” Major Casals continued, “is not classified. But a good deal of what you will be learning is classified. This is why the college is under military charter. To reveal or transmit or make public classified information given you during your schooling here falls under the jurisdiction of the military. For a breech of these statues you would be tried by a military tribunal.”
   The students murmured. To himself Bibleman thought, Banged, ganged, and then some. No one spoke. Even the girl beside him was silent. A complicated expression had crossed her face, however; a deeply introverted look, somber and—he thought—unusually mature. It made her seem older, no longer a girl. It made him wonder just how old she really was. It was as if in her features a thousand years had surfaced before him as he scrutinized her and pondered the officer on the stage and the great information hologram behind him. What is she thinking? he wondered. Is she going to say something more? How can she be not afraid to speak up? We’ve been told we are under military law.
   Major Casals said, “I am going to give you an instance of a strictly classified cluster of data. It deals with the Panther Engine.” Behind him the hologram, surprisingly, became blank.
   “Sir,” one of the students said, “the hologram isn’t showing anything.”
   “This is not an area that will be dealt with in your studies here,” Major Casals said. “The Panther Engine is a two-rotor system, opposed rotors serving a common main shaft. Its main advantage is a total lack of centrifugal torque in the housing. A cam chain is thrown between the opposed rotors, which permits the main shaft to reverse itself without hysteresis.”
   Behind him the big hologram remained blank. Strange, Bibleman thought. An eerie sensation: information without information, as if the computer had gone blind.
   Major Casals said, “The College is forbidden to release any information about the Panther Engine. It cannot be programmed to do otherwise. In fact, it knows nothing about the Panther Engine; it is programmed to destroy any information it receives in that sector.”
   Raising his hand, a student said, “So even if someone fed information into the College about the Panther—”
   “It would eject the data,” Major Casals said.
   “Is this a unique situation?” another student asked.
   “No,” Major Casals said.
   “Then there’re a number of areas we can’t get printouts for,” a student murmured.
   “Nothing of importance,” Major Casals said. “At least as far as your studies are concerned.”
   The students were silent.
   “The subjects which you will study,” Major Casals said, “will be assigned to you, based on your aptitude and personality profiles. I’ll call off your names and you will come forward for your allocation of topic assignment. The College itself has made the final decision for each of you, so you can be sure no error has been made.”
   What if I get proctology? Bibleman asked himself. In panic he thought, Or podiatry. Or herpetology. Or suppose the College in its infinite computeroid wisdom decides to ram into me all the information in the universe pertaining to or resembling herpes labialis… or things even worse. If there is anything worse.
   “What you want,” Mary said, as the names were read alphabetically, “is a program that’ll earn you a living. You have to be practical. I know what I’ll get; I know where my strong point lies. It’ll be chemistry.”
   His name was called; rising, he walked up the aisle to Major Casals. They looked at each other, and then Casals handed him an unsealed envelope.
   Stiffly, Bibleman returned to his seat.
   “You want me to open it?” Mary said.
   Wordlessly, Bibleman passed the envelope to her. She opened it and studied the printout.
   “Can I earn a living with it?” he said.
   She smiled. “Yes, it’s a high-paying field. Almost as good as—well, let’s just say that the colony planets are really in need of this. You could go to work anywhere.”
   Looking over her shoulder, he saw the words on the page.


Cosmology Cosmogony Pre-Socratics

   “Pre-Socratic philosophy,” Mary said. “Almost as good as structural engineering.” She passed him the paper. “I shouldn’t kid you. No, it’s not really something you can make a living at, unless you teach… but maybe it interests you. Does it interest you?”
   “No,” he said shortly.
   “I wonder why the college picked it, then,” Mary said.
   “What the hell,” he said, “is cosmogony?”
   “How the universe came into being. Aren’t you interested in how the universe—” She paused, eyeing him. “You certainly won’t be asking for printouts of any classified material,” she said meditatively. “Maybe that’s it,” she murmured, to herself. “They won’t have to watchdog you.”
   “I can be trusted with classified material,” he said.
   “Can you? Do you know yourself? But you’ll be getting into that when the College bombards you with early Greek thought. ‘Know thyself.’ Apollo’s motto at Delphi. It sums up half of Greek philosophy.”
   Bibleman said, “I’m not going up before a military tribunal for making public classified military material.” He thought, then, about the Panther Engine and he realized, fully realized, that a really grim message had been spelled out in that little lecture by Major Casals. “I wonder what Herbie the Hyena’s motto is,” he said.
   “ ‘I am determined to prove a villain,’ ” Mary said. “ ‘And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots have I laid.’ ” She reached out to touch him on the arm. “Remember? The Herbie the Hyena cartoon version of Richard the Third.”
   “Mary Lorne,” Major Casals said, reading off the list.
   “Excuse me.” She went up, returned with her envelope, smiling. “Leprology,” she said to Bibleman. “The study and treatment of leprosy. I’m kidding; it’s chemistry.”
   “You’ll be studying classified material.” Bibleman said.
   “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

   On the first day of his study program, Bob Bibleman set his College input-output terminal on AUDIO and punched the proper key for his coded course.
   “Thales of Miletus,” the terminal said. “The founder of the Ionian school of natural philosophy.”
   “What did he teach?” Bibleman said.
   “That the world floated on water, was sustained by water, and originated in water.”
   “That’s really stupid,” Bibleman said.
   The College terminal said, “Thales based this on the discovery of fossil fish far inland, even at high altitudes. So it is not as stupid as it sounds.” It showed on its holoscreen a great deal of written information, no part of which struck Bibleman as very interesting. Anyhow, he had requested AUDIO. “It is generally considered that Thales was the first rational man in history,” the terminal said.
   “What about Ikhnaton?” Bibleman said.
   “He was strange.”
   “Moses?”
   “Likewise strange.”
   “Hammurabi?”
   “How do you spell that?”
   “I’m not sure. I’ve just heard the name.”
   “Then we will discuss Anaximander,” the College terminal said. “And, in a cursory initial survey, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Paramenides, Melissus—wait a minute; I forgot Heraclitus and Cratylus. And we will study Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Zeno—”
   “Christ,” Bibleman said.
   “That’s another program,” the College terminal said.
   “Just continue,” Bibleman said.
   “Are you taking notes?”
   “That’s none of your business.”
   “You seem to be in a state of conflict.”
   Bibleman said, “What happens to me if I flunk out of the College?”
   “You go to jail.”
   “I’ll take notes.”
   “Since you are so driven—”
   “What?”
   “Since you are so full of conflict, you should find Empedocles interesting. He was the first dialectical philosopher. Empedocles believed that the basis of reality was an antithetical conflict between the forces of Love and Strife. Under Love the whole cosmos is a duly proportioned mixture, called a krasis. This krasis is a spherical deity, a single perfect mind which spends all its time—”
   “Is there any practical application to any of this?” Bibleman interrupted.
   “The two antithetical forces of Love and Strife resemble the Taoist elements of Yang and Yin with their perpetual interaction from which all change takes place.”
   “Practical application.”
   “Twin mutually opposed constituents.” On the holoscreen a schematic diagram, very complex, formed. “The two-rotor Panther Engine.”
   “What?” Bibleman said, sitting upright in his seat. He made out the large words


PANTHER HYDRODRIVE SYSTEM TOP SECRET

   above the schematic comprising the readout. Instantly he pressed the PRINT key; the machinery of the terminal whirred and three sheets of paper slid down into the RETRIEVE slot.
   They overlooked it, Bibleman realized, this entry in the College’s memory banks relating to the Panther Engine. Somehow the cross-referencing got lost. No one thought of pre-Socratic philosophy—who would expect an entry on an engine, a modern-day top-secret engine, under the category PHILOSOPHY, PRE-SOCRATIC, subheading EMPEDOCLES?
   I’ve got it in my hands, he said to himself as he swiftly lifted out the three sheets of paper. He folded them up and stuck them into the notebook the College had provided.
   I’ve hit it, he thought. Right off the bat. Where the hell am I going to put these schematics? Can’t hide them in my locker. And then he thought, Have I committed a crime already, by asking for a written printout?
   “Empedocles,” the terminal was saying, “believed in four elements as being perpetually rearranged: earth, water, air, and fire. These elements eternally—”
   Click. Bibleman had shut the terminal down. The holoscreen faded to opaque gray.
   Too much learning doth make a man slow, he thought as he got to his feet and started from the cubicle. Fast of wit but slow of foot. Where the hell am I going to hide the schematics? he asked himself again as he walked rapidly down the hall toward the ascent tube. Well, he realized, they don’t know I have them; I can take my time. The thing to do is hide them at a random place, he decided, as the tube carried him to the surface. And even if they find them they won’t be able to trace them back to me, not unless they go to the trouble of dusting for fingerprints.
   This could be worth billions of dollars, he said to himself. A great joy filled him and then came the fear. He discovered that he was trembling. Will they ever be pissed, he said to himself. When they find out, I won’t be pissing purple, they’ll be pissing purple. The College itself will, when it discovers its error.
   And the error, he thought, is on its part, not mine. The College fucked up and that’s too bad.

   In the dorm where his bunk was located, he found a laundry room maintained by a silent robot staff, and when no robot was watching he hid the three pages of schematics near the bottom of a huge pile of bed sheets. As high as the ceiling, this pile. They won’t get down to the schematics this year. I have plenty of time to decide what to do.
   Looking at his watch, he saw that the afternoon had almost come to an end. At five o’clock he would be seated in the cafeteria, eating dinner with Mary.
   She met him a little after five o’clock; her face showed signs of fatigue.
   “How’d it go?” she asked him as they stood in line with their trays.
   “Fine,” Bibleman said.
   “Did you get to Zeno? I always like Zeno; he proved that motion is impossible. So I guess I’m still in my mother’s womb. You look strange.” She eyed him.
   “Just sick of listening to how the earth rests on the back of a giant turtle.”
   “Or is suspended on a long string,” Mary said. Together they made their way among the other students to an empty table. “You’re not eating much.”
   “Feeling like eating,” Bibleman said as he drank his cup of coffee, “is what got me here in the first place.”
   “You could flunk out.”
   “And go to jail.”
   Mary said, “The College is programmed to say that. Much of it is probably just threats. Talk loudly and carry a small stick, so to speak.”
   “I have it,” Bibleman said.
   “You have what?” She ceased eating and regarded him.
   He said, “The Panther Engine.”
   Gazing at him, the girl was silent.
   “The schematics,” he said.
   “Lower your goddam voice.”
   “They missed a citation in the memory storage. Now that I have them I don’t know what to do. Just start walking, probably. And hope no one stops me.
   “They don’t know? The College didn’t self-monitor?”
   “I have no reason to think it’s aware of what it did.”
   “Jesus Christ,” Mary said softly. “On your first day. You had better do a lot of slow, careful thinking.”
   “I can destroy them,” he said. “Or sell them.”
   He said, “I looked them over. There’s an analysis on the final page. The Panther—”
   “Just say it,”Mary said.
   “It can be used as a hydroelectric turbine and cut costs in half. I couldn’t understand the technical language, but I did figure out that. Cheap power source. Very cheap.”
   “So everyone would benefit.”
   He nodded.
   “They really screwed up,” Mary said. “What was it Casals told us? ‘Even if someone fed data into the College about the—about it, the College would eject the data.’ ” She began eating slowly, meditatively. “And they’re withholding it from the public. It must be industry pressure. Nice.”
   “What should I do?” Bibleman said.
   “I can’t tell you that.”
   “What I was thinking is that I could take the schematics to one of the colony planets where the authorities have less control. I could find an independent firm and make a deal with them. The government wouldn’t know how—”
   “They’d figure out where the schematics came from,” Mary said. “They’d trace it back to you.”
   “Then I better burn them.”
   Mary said, “You have a very difficult decision to make. On the one hand, you have classified information in your possession which you obtained illegally. On the other—”
   “I didn’t obtain it illegally. The College screwed up.”
   Calmly, she continued, “You broke the law, military law, when you asked for a written transcript. You should have reported the breach of security as soon as you discovered it. They would have rewarded you. Major Casals would have said nice things to you.”
   “I’m scared,” Bibleman said, and he felt the fear moving around inside him, shifting about and growing; as he held his plastic coffee cup it shook, and some of the coffee spilled onto his uniform.
   Mary, with a paper napkin, dabbed at the coffee stain.
   “I won’t come off,” she said.
   “Symbolism,” Bibleman said. “Lady Macbeth. I always wanted to have a dog named Spot so I could say, ‘Out, out, damned Spot.’ ”
   “I am not going to tell you what to do,” Mary said. “This is a decision that you will make alone. It isn’t ethical for you even to discuss it with me; that could be considered conspiracy and put us both in prison.”
   “Prison,” he echoed.
   “You have it within your—Christ, I was going to say, ‘You have it within your power to provide a cheap power source to human civilization.’ ” She laughed and shook her head. “I guess this scares me, too. Do what you think is right. If you think it’s right to publish the schematics—”
   “I never thought of that. Just publish them. Some magazine or newspaper. A slave printing construct could print it and distribute it all over the solar system in fifteen minutes.” All I have to do, he realized, is pay the fee and then feed in the three pages of schematics. As simple as that. And then spend the rest of my life in jail or anyhow in court. Maybe the adjudication would go in my favor. There are precedents in history where vital classified material—military classified material—was stolen and published, and not only was the person found innocent but we now realize that he was a hero; he served the welfare of the human race itself, and risked his life.
   Approaching their table, two armed military security guards closed in on Bob Bibleman; he stared at them, not believing what he saw but thinking, Believe it.
   “Student Bibleman?” one of them said.
   “It’s on my uniform,” Bibleman said.
   “Hold out your hands, Student Bibleman.” The larger of the two security guards snapped handcuffs on him.
   Mary said nothing; she continued slowly eating.
   In Major Casal’s office Bibleman waited, grasping the fact that he was being—as the technical term had it—“detained.” He felt glum. He wondered what they would do. He wondered if he had been set up. He wondered what he would do if he were charged. He wondered why it was taking so long. And then he wondered what it was all about really and he wondered whether he would understand the grand issues if he continued with his courses in COSMOLOGY COSMOGONY PRE-SOCRATICS.
   Entering the office, Major Casals said briskly, “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
   “Can these handcuffs be removed?” Bibleman said. They hurt his wrists; they had been clapped on to him as tightly as possible. His bone structure ached.
   “We couldn’t find the schematics,” Casals said, seating himself behind his desk.
   “What schematics?”
   “For the Panther Engine.”
   “There aren’t supposed to be any schematics for the Panther Engine. You told us that in orientation.”
   “Did you program your terminal for that deliberately? Or did it just happen to come up?”
   “My terminal programmed itself to talk about water,” Bibleman said. “The universe is composed of water.”
   “It automatically notified security when you asked for a written transcript. All written transcripts are monitored.”
   “Fuck you,” Bibleman said.
   Major Casals said, “I tell you what. We’re only interested in getting the schematics back; we’re not interested in putting you in the slam. Return them and you won’t be tried.”
   “Return what?” Bibleman said, but he knew it was a waste of time. “Can I think it over?”
   “Yes.”
   “Can I go? I feel like going to sleep. I’m tired. I feel like having these cuffs off.”
   Removing the cuffs, Major Casals said, “We made an agreement, with all of you, an agreement between the College and the students, about classified material. You entered into that agreement.”
   “Freely?” Bibleman said.
   “Well, no. But the agreement was known to you. When you discovered the schematics for the Panther Engine encoded in the College’s memory and available to anyone who happened for any reason, any reason whatsoever, to ask for a practical application of pre-Socratic—”
   “I was as surprised as hell,” Bibleman said. “I still am.”
   “Loyalty is an ethical principle. I’ll tell you what; I’ll waive the punishment factor and put it on the basis of loyalty to the College. A responsible person obeys laws and agreements entered into. Return the schematics and you can continue your courses here at the College. In fact, we’ll give you permission to select what subjects you want; they won’t be assigned to you. I think you’re good college material. Think it over and report back to me tomorrow morning, between eight and nine, here in my office. Don’t talk to anyone; don’t try to discuss it. You’ll be watched. Don’t try to leave the grounds. Okay?”
   “Okay,” Bibleman said woodenly.
   He dreamed that night that he had died. In his dream vast spaces stretched out, and his father was coming toward him, very slowly, out of a dark glade and into the sunlight. His father seemed glad to see him, and Bibleman felt his father’s love.
   When he awoke, the feeling of being loved by his father remained. As he put on his uniform, he thought about his father and how rarely, in actual life, he had gotten that love. It made him feel lonely, now, his father being dead and his mother as well. Killed in a nuclear-power accident, along with a whole lot of other people
   They say someone important to you waits for you on the other side, he thought. Maybe by the time I die Major Casals will be dead and he will be waiting for me, to greet me gladly. Major Casals and my father combined as one.
   What am I going to do? he asked himself. They have waived the punitive aspects; it’s reduced to essentials, a matter of loyalty. Am I a loyal person? Do I qualify?
   The hell with it, he said to himself. He looked at his watch. Eight-thirty. My father would be proud of me, he thought. For what I am going to do.
   Going into the laundry room, he scoped out the situation. No robots in sight. He dug down in the pile of bed sheets, found the pages of schematics, took them out, looked them over, and headed for the tube that would take him to Major Casal’s office.
   “You have them,” Casals said as Bibleman entered. Bibleman handed the three sheets of paper over to him.
   “And you made no other copies?” Casals asked.
   “No.”
   “You give me your word of honor?”
   “Yes,” Bibleman said.
   “You are herewith expelled from the College,” Major Casals said.
   “What?” Bibleman said.
   Casals pressed a button on his desk. “Come in.”
   The door opened and Mary Lorne stood there.
   “I do not represent the College,” Major Casals said to Bibleman. “You were set up.”
   “I am the College,” Mary said.
   Major Casals said, “Sit down, Bibleman. She will explain it to you before you leave.”
   “I failed?” Bibleman said.
   “You failed me,” Mary said. “The purpose of the test was to teach you to stand on your own feet, even if it meant challenging authority. The covert message of institutions is: ‘Submit to that which you psychologically construe as an authority.’ A good school trains the whole person; it isn’t a matter of data and information; I was trying to make you morally and psychologically complete. But a person can’t be commanded to disobey. You can’t order someone to rebel. All I could do was give you a model, an example.”
   Bibleman thought, When she talked back to Casals at the initial orientation. He felt numb.
   “The Panther Engine is worthless,” Mary said, “as a technological artifact. This is a standard test we use on each student, no matter what study course he is assigned.”
   “They all got a readout on the Panther Engine?” Bibleman said with disbelief. He stared at the girl.
   “They will, one by one. Yours came very quickly. First you are told that it is classified; you are told the penalty for releasing classified information; then you are leaked the information. It is hoped that you will make it public or at least try to make it public.”
   Major Casals said, “You saw on the third page of the printout that the engine supplied an economical source of hydroelectric power. That was important. You knew that the public would benefit if the engine design was released.”
   “And legal penalties were waived,” Mary said. “So what you did was not done out of fear.”
   “Loyalty,” Bibleman said. “I did it out of loyalty.”
   “To what?” Mary said.
   He was silent; he could not think.
   “To a holoscreen?” Major Casals said.
   “To you,” Bibleman said.
   Major Casals said, “I am someone who insulted you and derided you. Someone who treated you like dirt. I told you that if I ordered you to piss purple, you—”
   “Okay,” Bibleman said. “Enough.”
   “Goodbye,” Mary said.
   “What?” Bibleman said, startled.
   “You’re leaving. You’re going back to your life and job, what you had before we picked you.”
   Bibleman said, “I’d like another chance.”
   “But,” Mary said, “you know how the test works now. So it can never be given to you again. You know what is really wanted from you by the College. I’m sorry.”
   “I’m sorry, too,” Major Casals said.
   Bibleman said nothing.
   Holding out her hand, Mary said, “Shake?”
   Blindly, Bibleman shook hands with her. Major Casals only stared at him blankly; he did not offer his hand. He seemed to be engrossed in some other topic, perhaps some other person. Another student was on his mind, perhaps. Bibleman could not tell.

   Three nights later, as he wandered aimlessly through the mixture of lights and darkness of the city, Bob Bibleman saw ahead of him a robot food vendor at its eternal post. A teenage boy was in the process of buying a taco and an apple turnover. Bob Bibleman lined up behind the boy and stood waiting, his hands in his pockets, no thoughts coming to him, only a dull feeling, a sense of emptiness. As if the inattention which he had seen on Casal’s face had taken him over, he thought to himself. He felt like an object, an object among objects, like the robot vendor. Something which, as he well knew, did not look you directly in the eye.
   “What’ll it be, sir?” the robot asked.
   Bibleman said, “Fries, a cheeseburger, and a strawberry shake. Are there any contests?”
   After a pause the robot said, “Not for you, Mr. Bibleman.”
   “Okay,” he said, and stood waiting.
   The food came, on its little throwaway plastic tray, in its little throwaway cartons.
   “I’m not paying,” Bibleman said, and walked away.
   The robot called after him, “Eleven hundred dollars. Mr. Bibleman. You’re breaking the law!”
   He turned, got out his wallet.
   “Thank you, Mr. Bibleman,” the robot said. “I am very proud of you.”

Chains of Air, Web of Aether

   The planet on which he was living underwent each day two mornings. First CY30 appeared and then its minor twin put in a feeble appearance, as if God had not been able to make up His mind as to which sun He preferred and had finally settled on both. The domers liked to compare it to sequential settings of an old-fashioned multifilament incandescent bulb. CY30 gave the impression of getting up to about 150 watts and then came little CY30B, which added 50 more watts of light. The aggregate luminae made the methane crystals of the planet’s surface sparkle pleasantly, assuming you were indoors.
   At the table of his dome, Leo McVane drank fake coffee and read the newspaper. He felt anxiety-free and warm because he had long ago illegally redesigned his dome’s thermostat. He felt safe as well because he had added an extra metal brace to the dome’s hatch. And he felt expectant because today the food man would be by, so there would be someone to talk to. It was a good day.
   All his communications gear fumbled along on autostasis, at the moment, monitoring whatever the hell they monitored. Originally, upon being stationed at CY30 II, McVane had thoroughly studied the function and purpose of the complexes of electronic marvels for which he was the caretaker—or rather, as his job coding put it, the “master homonoid overseer.” Now he had allowed himself to forget most of the transactions which his charges engaged in. Communications equipment led a monotonous life until an emergency popped up, at which point he ceased suddenly to be the “master homonoid overseer” and became the living brain of his station.
   There had not been an emergency yet.
   The newspaper contained a funny item from the United States Federal Income Tax booklet for 1978, the year McVane had been born. These entries appeared in the index in this order:


   Who Should File
   Widows and Widowers, Qualifying
   Winnings—Prizes, Gambling, and Lotteries
   Withholding—Federal Tax


   And then the final entry in the index, which McVane found amusing and even interesting as a commentary on an archaic way of life:


Zero Bracket Amount

   To himself, McVane grinned. That was how the United States Federal Income Tax booklet’s 1978 index had ended, very appropriately, and that was how the United States, a few years later, had ended. It had fiscally fucked itself over and died of the trauma.
   “Food ration comtrix,” the audio transducer of his radio announced. “Start unbolting procedure.”
   “Unbolting under way,” McVane said, laying aside his newspaper.
   The speaker said, “Put helmet on.”
   “Helmet on.” McVane made no move to pick up his helmet; his atmosphere flow rate would compensate for the loss; he had redesigned it, too.
   The hatch unscrewed, and there stood the food man, headbubble and all. An alarm bell in the dome’s ceiling shrilled that atmospheric pressure had sharply declined.
   “Put your helmet on!” the food man ordered angrily.
   The alarm bell ceased complaining; the pressure had restabilized. At that, the food man grimaced. He popped his helmet and then began to unload cartons from his comtrix.
   “We are a hardy race,” McVane said, helping him.
   “You have amped up everything,” the food man observed; like all the rovers who serviced domes, he was sturdily built and he moved rapidly. It was not a safe job operating a comtrix shuttle between mother ships and the domes of CY30II. He knew it, and McVane knew it. Anybody could sit in a dome; few people could function outside.
   “Stick around for a while,” McVane said after he and the food man had unloaded and the food man was marking the invoice.
   “If you have coffee.”
   They sat facing each other across the table, drinking coffee. Outside the dome the methane messed around, but here neither man felt it. The food man perspired; he apparently found McVane’s temperature level too high.
   “You know the woman in the next dome?” the food man asked.
   “Somewhat,” McVane said. “My rig transfers data to her input circuitry every three or four weeks. She stores it, boosts it, and transmits it. I suppose. Or for all I know—”
   “She’s sick,” the food man said.
   McVane said, “She looked all right the last time I talked to her. We used video. She did say something about having trouble reading her terminal’s displays.”
   “She’s dying,” the food man said, and sipped his coffee.
   In his mind, McVane tried to picture the woman. Small and dark, and what was her name? He punched a couple of keys on the board beside him, her name came up on its display, retrieved by the code they used. Rybus Rommey. “Dying of what?” he said.
   “Multiple sclerosis.”
   “How far advanced is it?”
   “Not far at all,” the food man said. “A couple of months ago, she told me that when she was in her late teens she suffered an—what is it called? Aneurysm. In her left eye, which wiped out her central vision in that eye. They suspected at the time that it might be the onset of multiple sclerosis. And then today when I talked to her she said she’s been experiencing optic neuritis, which—”
   McVane said, “Both symptoms were fed to M.E.D.?”
   “A correlation of an aneurysm and then a period of remission and then double vision, blurring… you ought to call her up and talk to her. When I was delivering to her, she was crying.”
   Turning to his keyboard, McVane punched out and punched out and then read the display. “There’s a thirty to forty percent cure rate for multiple sclerosis.”
   “Not out here. M.E.D. can’t get to her out here.”
   “Shit,” McVane said.
   “I told her to demand a transfer back home. That’s what I’d do. She won’t do it.”
   “She’s crazy,” McVane said.
   “You’re right. She’s crazy. Everybody out here is crazy. You want proof of it? She’s proof of it. Would you go back home if you knew you were very sick?”
   “We’re never supposed to surrender our domes.”
   “What you monitor is so important.” The food man set down his cup. “I have to go.” As he got to his feet, he said, “Call her and talk to her. She needs someone to talk to and you’re the closest dome. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.”
   McVane thought, I didn’t ask.
   After the food man had departed, McVane got the code for Rybus Rommey’s dome, and started to run it into his transmitter, and then hesitated. His wall clock showed 1830 hours. At this point in his forty-two-hour cycle, he was supposed to accept a sequence of high-speed entertainment audio– and videotaped signals emanating from a slave satellite at CY30 III; upon storing them, he was to run them back at normal and select the material suitable for the overall dome system on his own planet.
   He took a look at the log. Fox was doing a concert that ran two hours. Linda Fox, he thought. You and your synthesis of old-time rock and modern-day streng. Jesus, he thought. If I don’t transcribe the relay of your live concert, every domer on the planet will come storming in here and kill me. Outside of emergencies—which don’t occur—this is what I’m paid to handle: information traffic between planets, information that connects us with home and keeps us human. The tape drums have got to turn.
   He started the tape transport at its high-speed mode, set the module’s controls for receive, locked it in at the satellite’s operating frequency, checked the wave-form on the visual scope to be sure that the carrier was coming in undistorted, and then patched into an audio transduction of what he was getting.
   The voice of Linda Fox emerged from the strip of drivers mounted above him. As the scope showed, there was no distortion. No noise. No clipping. All channels, in fact, were balanced; his meters indicated that.
   Sometimes I could cry myself when I hear her, he thought. Speaking of crying.


“Wandering all across this land,
My band.
In the worlds that pass above,
I love.
Play for me, you spirits who are weightless.
I believe in drinking to your greatness.
My band.”


   And behind Linda Fox’s vocal, the syntholutes which were her trademark. Until Fox, no one had ever thought of bringing back that sixteenth-century instrument for which Dowland had written so beautifully and so effectively.


“Shall I sue? shall I seek for grace?
Shall I pray? shall I prove?
Shall I strive to a heavenly joy
With an earthly love?
Are there worlds? are there moons
Where the lost shall endure?
Shall I find for a heart that is pure?”


   What Linda Fox had done was take the lute books of John Dowland, written at the end of the sixteenth century, and remastered both the melodies and the lyrics into something of today. Some new thing, he thought, for scattered people as flung as if they had been dropped in haste: here and there, disarranged, in domes, on the backs of miserable worlds and in satellites—victimized by the power of migration, and with no end in sight.


“Silly wretch, let me rail
At a trip that is blind.
Holy hopes do require”


   He could not remember the rest. Well, he had it taped, of course.


“…no human may find.”


   Or something like that. The beauty of the universe lay not in the stars figured into it but in the music generated by human minds, human voices, human hands. Syntholutes mixed on an intricate board by experts, and the voice of Fox. He thought, I know what I must have to keep on going. My job is delight: I transcribe this and I broadcast it and they pay me.
   “This is the Fox,” Linda Fox said.
   McVane switched the video to holo, and a cube formed in which Linda Fox smiled at him. Meanwhile, the drums spun at furious speed, getting hour upon hour into his permanent possession.
   “You are with the Fox,” she said, “and the Fox is with you.” She pinned him with her gaze, the hard, bright eyes. The diamond face, feral and wise, feral and true; this is the Fox speaking to you. He smiled back.
   “Hi, Fox,” he said.

   Sometime later he called the sick girl in the next dome. It took her an amazingly long time to respond to his signal, and as he sat noting the signal register on his own board he thought, Is she finished? Or did they come and forcibly evacuate her?
   His microscreen showed vague colors. Visual static, nothing more. And then there she was.
   “Did I wake you up?” he asked. She seemed so slowed down, so torpid. Perhaps, he thought, she’s sedated.
   “No. I was shooting myself in the ass.”
   “What?” he said, startled.
   “Chemotherapy,” Rybus said. “I’m not doing too well.”
   “I just now taped a terrific Linda Fox concert; I’ll be broadcasting it in the next few days. It’ll cheer you up.”
   “It’s too bad we’re stuck in these domes. I wish we could visit one another. The food man was just here. In fact, he brought me my medication. It’s effective, but it makes me throw up.”
   McVane thought, I wish I hadn’t called.
   “Is there any way you could visit me?” Rybus asked.
   “I have no portable air, none at all.”
   “I have,” Rybus said.
   In panic, he said, “But if you’re sick—”
   “I can make it over to your dome.”
   “What about your station? What if data come in that—”
   “I’ve got a beeper I can bring with me.”
   Presently he said, “Okay.”
   “It would mean a lot to me, someone to sit with for a little while. The food man stays like half an hour, but that’s as long as he can. You know what he told me? There’s been an outbreak of a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on CY30 VI. It must be a virus. This whole condition is a virus. Christ, I’d hate to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This is like the Mariana form.”
   “Is it contagious?”
   She did not directly answer. Instead she said, “What I have can be cured.” Obviously she wanted to reassure him. “If the virus is around… I won’t come over; it’s okay.” She nodded and reached to shut off her transmitter. “I’m going to lie down,” she said, “and get more sleep. With this you’re supposed to sleep as much as you can. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Goodbye.”
   “Come over,” he said.
   Brightening, she said, “Thank you.”
   “But be sure you bring your beeper. I have a hunch a lot of telemetric confirms are going to—”
   “Oh, fuck the telemetric confirms!” Rybus said, with venom. “I’m so sick of being stuck in this goddam dome! Aren’t you going buggy sitting around watching tape drums turn and little meters and gauges and shit?”
   “I think you should go back home,” he said.
   “No,” she said, more calmly. “I’m going to follow exactly the M.E.D. instructions for my chemotherapy and beat this fucking M.S. I’m not going home. I’ll come over and fix your dinner. I’m a good cook. My mother was Italian and my father is Chicano so I spice everything I fix, except you can’t get spices out here. But I figured out how to beat that with different synthetics. I’ve been experimenting.”
   “In this concert I’m going to be broadcasting,” McVane said, “the Fox does a version of Dowland’s ‘Shall I Sue.’ ”
   “A song about litigation?”
   “No. ‘Sue’ in the sense of to pay court to or woo. In matters of love.” And then he realized that she was putting him on.
   “Do you want to know what I think of the Fox?” Rybus asked. “Recycled sentimentality, which is the worst kind of sentimentality; it isn’t even original. And she looks like her face is on upside down. She has a mean mouth.”
   “I like her,” he said stiffly; he felt himself becoming mad, really mad. I’m supposed to help you? he asked himself. Run the risk of catching what you have so you can insult the Fox?
   “I’ll fix you beef stroganoff with parsley noodles,” Rybus said.
   “I’m doing fine,” he said.
   Hesitating, she said in a low, faltering voice, “Then you don’t want me to come over?”
   “I—” he said.
   “I’m very frightened, Mr. McVane,” Rybus said. “Fifteen minutes from now, I’m going to be throwing up from the IV Neurotoxite. But I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to give up my dome and I don’t want to be by myself. I’m sorry if I offended you. It’s just that to me the Fox is a joke. I won’t say anything more; I promise.”
   “Do you have the—” He amended what he intended to say. “Are you sure it won’t be too much for you, fixing dinner?”
   “I’m stronger now than I will be,” she said. “I’ll be getting weaker for a long time.”
   “How long?”
   “There’s no way to tell.”
   He thought, You are going to die. He knew it and she knew it. They did not have to talk about it. The complicity of silence was there, the agreement. A dying girl wants to cook me a dinner, he thought. A dinner I don’t want to eat. I’ve got to say no to her. I’ve got to keep her out of my dome. The insistence of the weak, he thought. Their dreadful power. It is so much easier to throw a body block against the strong!
   “Thank you,” he said. “I’d like it very much if we had dinner together. But make sure you keep radio contact with me on your way over here—so I’ll know you’re okay. Promise?”
   “Well, sure,” she said. “Otherwise”—she smiled—“they’d find me a century from now, frozen with pots, pans, and food, as well as synthetic spices. You do have portable air, don’t you?
   “No, I really don’t,” he said.
   And knew that his lie was palpable to her.

   The meal smelled good and tasted good, but halfway through Rybus excused herself and made her way unsteadily from the matrix of the dome—his dome—into the bathroom. He tried not to listen; he arranged it with his percept system not to hear and with his cognition not to know. In the bathroom the girl, violently sick, cried out and he gritted his teeth and pushed his plate away and then all at once he got up and set in motion his in-dome audio system; he played an early album of the Fox.


“Come again!
Sweet love doth now invite
Thy graces, that refrain
To do me due delight…”


   “Do you by any chance have some milk?” Rybus asked, standing at the bathroom door, her face pale.
   Silently, he got her a glass of milk, or what passed for milk on their planet.
   “I have antiemetics,” Rybus said as she held the glass of milk, “but I didn’t remember to bring any with me. They’re back at my dome.”
   “I could get them for you,” he said.
   “You know what M.E.D. told me?” Her voice was heavy with indignation. “They said that this chemotherapy won’t make my hair fall out, but already it’s coming out in—”
   “Okay,” he interrupted.
   “Okay?”
   “I’m sorry,” he said.
   “This is upsetting you,” Rybus said. “The meal is spoiled and you’re—I don’t know what. If I’d remembered to bring my antiemetics, I’d be able to keep from—” She became silent. “Next time I’ll bring them. I promise. This is one of the few albums of Fox that I like. She was really good then, don’t you think?”
   “Yes,” he said tightly.
   “Linda Box,” Rybus said.
   “What?” he said.
   “Linda the box. That’s what my sister and I used to call her.” She tried to smile.
   “Please go back to your dome.”
   “Oh,” she said. “Well—” She smoothed her hair, her hand shaking. “Will you come with me? I don’t think I can make it by myself right now. I’m really weak. I really am sick.”
   He thought, You are taking me with you. That’s what this is. That is what is happening. You will not go alone; you will take my spirit with you. And you know. You know it as well as you know the name of the medication you are taking, and you hate me as you hate the medication, as you hate M.E.D. and your illness; it is all hate, for each and every thing under these two suns. I know you. I understand you. I see what is coming. In fact, it has begun.
   And, he thought, I don’t blame you. But I will hang onto the Fox; the Fox will outlast you. And so will I. You are not going to shoot down the luminiferous aether which animates our souls. I will hang onto the Fox and the Fox will hold me in her arms and hang onto me. The two of us—we can’t be pried apart. I have dozens of hours of the Fox on audio– and videotape, and the tapes are not just for me but for everybody. You think you can kill that? he said to himself. It’s been tried before. The power of the weak, he thought, is an imperfect power; it loses in the end. Hence its name. We call it weak for a reason.
   “Sentimentality,” Rybus said.
   “Right,” he said sardonically.
   “Recycled at that.”
   “And mixed metaphors.”
   “Her lyrics?”
   “What I’m thinking. When I get really angry, I mix—”
   “Let me tell you something. One thing. If I am going to survive, I can’t be sentimental. I have to be very harsh. If I’ve made you angry, I’m sorry, but that is how it is. It is my life. Someday you may be in the spot I am in and then you’ll know. Wait for that and then judge me. If it ever happens. Meanwhile this stuff you’re playing on your in-dome audio system is crap. It has to be crap, for me. Do you see? You can forget about me; you can send me back to my dome, where I probably really belong, but if you have anything to do with me—”
   “Okay,” he said, “I understand.”
   “Thank you. May I have some more milk? Turn down the audio and we’ll finish eating. Okay?”
   Amazed, he said, “You’re going to keep on trying to—”
   “All those creatures—and species—who gave up trying to eat aren’t with us anymore.” She seated herself unsteadily, holding onto the table.
   “I admire you.”
   “No,” she said. “I admire you. It’s harder on you. I know.”
   “Death—” he began.
   “This isn’t death. You know what this is? In contrast to what’s coming out of your audio system? This is life. The milk, please; I really need it.”
   As he got her more milk, he said, “I guess you can’t shoot down aether. Luminiferous or otherwise.”
   “No,” she agreed, “since it doesn’t exist.”

   Commodity Central provided Rybus with two wigs, since, due to the chemo, her hair had been systematically killed. He preferred the light-colored one.
   When she wore her wig, she did not look too bad, but she had become weakened and a certain querulousness had crept into her discourse. Because she was not physically strong any longer—due more, he suspected, to the chemotherapy than to her illness—she could no longer manage to maintain her dome adequately. Making his way over there one day, he was shocked at what he found. Dishes, pots and pans and even glasses of spoiled food, dirty clothes strewn everywhere, litter and debris… troubled, he cleaned up for her and, to his vast dismay, realized that there was an odor pervading her dome, a sweet mixture of the smell of illness, of complex medications, the soiled clothing, and, worst of all, the rotting food itself.
   Until he cleaned an area, there was not even a place for him to sit. Rybus lay in bed, wearing a plastic robe open at the back. Apparently, however, she still managed to operate her electronic equipment; he noted that the meters indicated full activity. But she used the remote programmer normally reserved for emergency conditions; she lay propped up in bed with the programmer beside her, along with a magazine and a bowl of cereal and several bottles of medication.
   As before, he discussed the possibility of getting her transferred. She refused to be taken off her job; she had not budged.
   “I’m not going into a hospital,” she told him, and that, for her, ended the conversation.
   Later, back at his own dome, gratefully back, he put a plan into operation. The large AI System—Artificial Intelligence Plasma—which handled the major problem-solving for star systems in their area of the galaxy had some available time which could be bought for private use. Accordingly, he punched in an application and posted the total sum of financial credits he had saved up during the last few months.
   From Fomalhaut, where the Plasma drifted, he received back a positive response. The team which handled traffic for the Plasma was agreeing to sell him fifteen minutes of the Plasma’s time.
   At the rate at which he was being metered, he was motivated to feed the Plasma his data very skillfully and very rapidly. He told the Plasma who Rybus was—which gave the AI System access to her complete files, including her psychological profile—and he told it that his dome was the closest dome to her, and he told it of her fierce determination to live and her refusal to accept a medical discharge or even transfer from her station. He cupped his head into the shell for psychotronic output so that the Plasma at Fomalhaut could draw directly from his thoughts, thus making available to it all his unconscious, marginal impressions, realizations, doubts, ideas, anxieties, needs.
   “There will be a five-day delay in response,” the team signaled him. “Because of the distance involved. Your payment has been received and recorded. Over.”
   “Over,” he said, feeling glum. He had spent everything he had. A vacuum had consumed his worth. But the Plasma was the court of last appeal in matters of problem-solving. WHAT SHOULD I DO? he had asked the Plasma. In five days he would have the answer.
   During the next five days, Rybus became considerably weaker. She still fixed her own meals, however, although she seemed to eat the same thing over and over again: a dish of high-protein macaroni with grated cheese sprinkled over it. One day he found her wearing dark glasses. She did not want him to see her eyes.
   “My bad eye has gone berserk,” she said dispassionately. “Rolled up in my head like a window shade.” Spilled capsules and tablets lay everywhere around her on her bed. He picked up one of the half-empty bottles and saw that she was taking one of the most powerful analgesics available.
   “M.E.D. is prescribing this for you?” he said, wondering, Is she in that much pain?
   “I know somebody,” Rybus said. “At a dome on IV. The food man brought it over to me.”
   “This stuff is addictive.”
   “I’m lucky to get it. I shouldn’t really have it.”
   “I know you shouldn’t.”
   “That goddam M.E.D.” The vindictiveness of her tone was surprising. “It’s like dealing with a lower life-form. By the time they get around to prescribing, and then getting the medication to you, Christ, you’re an urn of ashes. I see no point in them prescribing for an urn of ashes.” She put her hand up to her skull. “I’m sorry; I should keep my wig on when you’re here.”
   “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
   “Could you bring me some Coke? Coke settles my stomach.”
   From her refrigerator he took a liter bottle of cola and poured her a glass. He had to wash the glass first; there wasn’t a clean one in the dome.
   Propped up before her at the foot of her bed, she had her standard-issue TV set going. It gabbled away mindlessly, but no one was listening or watching. He realized that every time he came over she had it on, even in the middle of the night.
   When he returned to his own dome, he felt a tremendous sense of relief, of an odious burden being lifted from him. Just to put physical distance between himself and her—that was a joy which raised his spirits. It’s as if, he thought, when I’m with her I have what she has. We share the illness.
   He did not feel like playing any Fox recordings so instead he put on the Mahler Second Symphony, The Resurrection. The only symphony scored for many pieces of rattan, he mused. A Ruthe, which looks like a small broom; they use it to play the bass drum. Too bad Mahler never saw a Morley wah-wah pedal, he thought, or he would have scored it into one of his longer symphonies.
   Just as the chorus came in, his in-dome audio system shut down; an extrinsic override had silenced it.
   “Transmission from Fomalhaut.”
   “Standing by.”
   “Use video, please. Ten seconds till start.”
   “Thank you,” he said.
   A readout appeared on his larger screen. It was the AI System, the plasma, replying a day early.


   Subject: Rybus Rommey
   Analysis: Thanatous
   ProgramAdvice: Total avoidance on your part
   EthicalFactor: Obviated



**Thank You**

   Blinking, McVane said reflexively, “Thank you.” He had dealt with the Plasma only once before and he had forgotten how terse its responses were. The screen cleared; the transmission had ended.
   He was not sure what “thanatous” meant, but he felt certain that it had something to do with death. It means she is dying, he pondered as he punched into the planet’s reference bank and asked for a definition. It means that she is dying or may die or is close to death, all of which I know.
   However, he was wrong. It meant producing death.
   Producing, he thought. There is a great difference between death and producing death. No wonder the AI System had notified him that the ethical factor was obviated on his part.
   She is a killer thing, he realized. Well, this is why is costs so much to consult the Plasma. You get—not a phony answer based on speculation—but an absolute response.
   While he was thinking about it and trying to calm himself down, his telephone rang. Before he picked it up he knew who it was.
   “Hi,” Rybus said in a trembling voice.
   “Hi,” he said.
   “Do you by any chance have any Celestial Seasonings Morning Thunder tea bags?”
   “What?” he said.
   “When I was over at your dome that time I fixed beef stroganoff for us, I thought I saw a canister of Celestial Seasonings—”
   “No,” he said. “I don’t. I used them up.”
   “Are you all right?”
   “I’m just tired,” he said, and he thought, She said “us.” She and I are an “us.” When did that happen? he asked himself. I guess that’s what the Plasma meant; it understood.
   “Do you have any kind of tea?”
   “No,” he said. His in-dome audio system suddenly came back on, released from its pause mode now that the Fomalhaut transmission had ended. The choir was singing.
   On the phone, Rybus giggled. “Fox is doing sound on sound? A whole chorus of a thousand—”
   “This is Mahler,” he said roughly.
   “Do you think you could come over and keep me company?” Rybus asked. “I’m sort of at loose ends.”
   After a moment, he said, “Okay. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
   “I was reading this article in—”
   “When I get there,” he broke in, “we can talk. I’ll see you in half an hour.” He hung up the phone.

   When he reached her dome, he found her propped up in bed, wearing her dark glasses and watching a soap opera on her TV. Nothing had changed since he had last visited her, except that the decaying food in the dishes and the fluids in the cups and glasses had become more dismaying.
   “You should watch this,” Rybus said, not looking up. “Okay; I’ll fill you in. Becky is pregnant, but her boyfriend doesn’t—”
   “I brought you some tea.” He set down four tea bags.
   “Could you get me some crackers? There’s a box on the shelf over the stove. I need to take a pill. It’s easier for me to take medication with food than with water because when I was about three years old… you’re not going to believe this. My father was teaching me to swim. We had a lot of money in those days; my father was a—well, he still is, although I don’t hear from him very often. He hurt his back opening one of those sliding security gates at a condo cluster where…” Her voice trailed off; she had again become engrossed in her TV.
   McVane cleared off a chair and seated himself.
   “I was very depressed last night,” Rybus said. “I almost called you. I was thinking about this friend of mine who’s now—well, she’s my age, but she’s got a class 4-C rating in time-motion studies involving prism fluctuation rate or some damn thing. I hate her. At my age! Can you feature that?” She laughed.
   “Have you weighed yourself lately?” he asked.
   “What? Oh no. But my weight’s okay. I can tell. You take a pinch of skin between your fingers, up near your shoulder, and I did that. I still have a fat layer.”
   “You look thin,” he said. He put his hand on her forehead.
   “Am I running a fever?”
   “No,” he said. He continued to hold his hand there, against her smooth damp skin, above her dark glasses. Above, he thought, the myelin sheath of nerve fibers which had developed the sclerotic patches which were killing her.
   You will be better off, he said to himself, when she is dead.
   Sympathetically, Rybus said, “Don’t feel bad. I’ll be okay. M.E.D. has cut my dosage of Vasculine. I only take it t.i.d. now—three times a day instead of four.”
   “You know all the medical terms,” he said.
   “I have to. They issued me a PDR. Want to look at it? It’s around here somewhere. Look under those papers over there. I was writing letters to several old friends because while I was looking for something else I came across their addresses. I’ve been throwing things away. See?” She pointed and he saw sacks, paper sacks, of crumpled papers. “I wrote for five hours yesterday and then I started in today. That’s why I wanted the tea; maybe you could fix me a cup. Put a whole lot of sugar in it and just a little milk.”
   As he fixed her the tea, fragments of a Linda Fox adaptation of a Dowland song moved through his mind.


“Thou mighty God
That rightest every wrong…
Listen to Patience
In a dying song.”


   “This program is really good,” Rybus said, when a series of commercials interrupted her TV soap opera. “Can I tell you about it?”
   Rather than answering, he asked, “Does the reduced dosage of Vasculine indicate that you’re improving?”
   “I’m probably going into another period of remission.”
   “How long can you expect it to last?”
   “Probably quite a while.”
   “I admire your courage,” he said. “I’m bailing out. This is the last time I’m coming over here.”
   “My courage?” she said. “Thank you.”
   “I’m not coming back.”
   “Not coming back when? You mean today?”
   “You are a death-dealing organism,” he said. “A pathogen.”
   “If we’re going to talk seriously,” she said, “I want to put my wig on. Could you bring me my blonde wig? It’s around somewhere, maybe under those clothes in the corner there. Where that red top is, the one with the white buttons. I have to sew a button back on it, if I can find the button.”
   He found her her wig.
   “Hold the hand mirror for me,” she said as she placed the wig on her skull. “Do you think I’m contagious? Because M.E.D. says that at this stage the virus is inactive. I talked to M.E.D. for over an hour yesterday; they gave me a special line.”
   “Who’s maintaining your gear?” he asked.
   “Gear?” She gazed at him from behind dark glasses.
   “Your job. Monitoring incoming traffic. Storing it and then transferring it. The reason you’re here.”
   “It’s on auto.”
   “You have seven warning lights on right now, all red and all blinking,” he said. “You should have an audio analog so you can hear it and not ignore it. You’re receiving but not recording and they’re trying to tell you.”
   “Well, they’re out of luck,” she responded in a low voice.
   “They have to take into account the fact that you’re sick,” he said.
   “Yes, they do. Of course they do. They can bypass me; don’t you receive roughly what I receive? Aren’t I essentially a backup station to your own?”
   “No,” he said. “I’m a backup station to yours.”
   “It’s all the same.” She sipped the mug of tea which he had fixed for her. “It’s too hot. I’ll let it cool.” Tremblingly, she reached to set down the mug on a table beside her bed; the mug fell, and hot tea poured out over the plastic floor. “Christ,” she said with fury. “Well, that does it; that really does it. Nothing has gone right today. Son of a bitch.”
   McVane turned on the dome’s vacuum circuit and it sucked up the spilled tea. He said nothing. He felt amorphous anger all through him, directed at nothing, fury without object, and he sensed that this was the quality of her own hate: it was a passion which went both nowhere and everywhere. Hate, he thought, like a flock of flies. God, he thought, how I want out of here. How I hate to hate like this, hating spilled tea with the same venom as I hate terminal illness. A one-dimensional universe. It has dwindled to that.

   In the weeks that followed, he made fewer and fewer trips from his dome to hers. He did not listen to what she said; he did not watch what she did; he averted his gaze from the chaos around her, the ruins of her dome. I am seeing a projection of her brain, he thought once as he momentarily surveyed the garbage which had piled up everywhere; she was even putting sacks outside the dome, to freeze for eternity. She is senile.
   Back in his own dome, he tried to listen to Linda Fox, but the magic had departed. He saw and heard a synthetic image. It was not real. Rybus Rommey had sucked the life out of the Fox the way her dome’s vacuum circuit had sucked up the spilled tea.


“And when his sorrows came as fast as floods,
Hope kept his heart till comfort came again.”


   McVane heard the words, but they didn’t matter. What had Rybus called it? Recycled sentimentality and crap. He put on a Vivaldi concerto for bassoon. There is only one Vivaldi concerto, he thought. A computer could do better. And be more diverse.
   “You’re picking up Fox waves,” Linda Fox said, and on his video transducer her face appeared, star-lit and wild. “And when those Fox waves hit you,” she said, “you have been hit!”
   In a momentary spasm of fury, he deliberately erased four hours of Fox, both video and audio. And then regretted it. He put in a call to one of the relay satellites for replacement tapes and was told that they were back-ordered.
   Fine, he said to himself. What the hell does it matter?
   That night, while he was sound asleep, his telephone rang. He let it ring; he did not answer it, and when it rang again ten minutes later he again ignored it.
   The third time it rang he picked it up and said hello.
   “Hi,” Rybus said.
   “What is it?” he said.
   “I’m cured.”
   “You’re in remission?”
   “No, I’m cured. M.E.D. just contacted me; their computer analyzed all my charts and tests and everything and there’s no sign of hard patches. Except, of course, I’ll never get central vision back in my bad eye. But other than that I’m okay.” She paused. “How have you been? I haven’t heard from you for so long—it seems like forever. I’ve been wondering about you.”
   He said, “I’m okay.”
   “We should celebrate.”
   “Yes,” he said.
   “I’ll fix dinner for us, like I used to. What would you like? I feel like Mexican food. I make a really good taco; I have the ground meat in my freezer, unless it’s gone bad. I’ll thaw it out and see. Do you want me to come over there or do you—”
   “Let me talk to you tomorrow,” he said.
   “I’m sorry to wake you up, but I just now heard from M.E.D.” She was silent a moment. “You’re the only friend I have,” she said. And then, incredibly, she began to cry.
   “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re well.”
   “I was so fucked up,” she said brokenly. “I’ll ring off and talk to you tomorrow. But you’re right; I can’t believe it, but I made it.”
   “It is due to your courage,” he said.
   “It’s due to you,” Rybus said. “I would have given up without you. I never told you this, but—well, I squirreled away enough sleeping pills to kill myself, and—”
   “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said, “about getting together.” He hung up and lay back down.
   He thought, When Job had lost his children, lands, and goods, Patience assuaged his excessive pain. And when his sorrows came as fast as floods, Hope kept his heart till comfort came again. As the Fox would put it.
   Recycled sentimentality, he thought. I got her through her ordeal and she paid me back by deriding into rubbish that which I cherished the most. But she is alive, he realized; she did make it. It’s like when someone tries to kill a rat. You can kill it six ways and it still survives. You can’t fault that.
   He thought, That is the name of what we are doing here in this star system on these frozen planets in these little domes. Rybus Rommey understood the game and played it right and won. To hell with Linda Fox. And then he thought, But also to hell with what I love.
   It is a good trade-off, he thought: a human life won and a synthetic media image wrecked. The law of the universe.
   Shivering, he pulled his covers over him and tried to get back to sleep.

   The food man showed up before Rybus did; he awoke McVane early in the morning with a full shipment.
   “Still got your temp and air illegally boosted,” the food man said as he unscrewed his helmet.
   “I just use the equipment,” McVane said. “I don’t build it.”
   “Well, I won’t report you. Got any coffee?”
   They sat facing each other across the table drinking fake coffee.
   “I just came from the Rommey girl’s dome,” the food man said. “She says she’s cured.”
   “Yeah, she phoned me late last night,” McVane said.
   “She says you did it.”
   To that, McVane said nothing.
   “You saved a human life.”
   “Okay,” McVane said.
   “What’s wrong?”
   “I’m just tired.”
   “I guess it took a lot out of you. Christ, it’s a mess over there. Can’t you clean it up for her? Destroy the garbage, at least, and sterilize the place; the whole goddam dome is septic. She let her garbage disposal get plugged and it backed up raw sewage all over her cupboards and shelves, where her food is stored. I’ve never seen anything like it. Of course, she’s been so weak—”
   McVane interrupted, “I’ll look into it.”
   Awkwardly, the food man said, “The main thing is, she’s cured. She was giving herself the shots, you know.”
   “I know,” McVane said. “I watched her.” Many times, he said to himself.
   “And her hair’s growing back. Boy, she looks awful without her wig. Don’t you agree?”
   Rising, McVane said, “I have to broadcast some weather reports. Sorry I can’t talk to you any longer.”

   Toward dinnertime Rybus Rommey appeared at the hatch of his dome, loaded down with pots and dishes and carefully wrapped packages. He let her in, and she made her way silently to the kitchen area, where she dumped everything down at once; two packages slid off onto the floor and she stooped to retrieve them.
   After she had taken off her helmet, she said, “It’s good to see you again.”
   “Likewise,” he said.
   “It’ll take about an hour to fix the tacos. Do you think you can wait until then?”
   “Sure,” he said.
   “I’ve been thinking,” Rybus said as she started a pan of grease heating on the stove. “We ought to take a vacation. Do you have any leave coming? I have two weeks owed me, although my situation is complicated by my illness. I mean, I used up a lot of my leave in the form of sick leave. Christ’s sake, they docked me one-half day a month, just because I couldn’t operate my transmitter. Can you believe it?”
   He said, “It’s nice to see you stronger.”
   “I’m fine,” she said. “Shit, I forgot the hamburger. Goddam it!” She stared at him.
   “I’ll go to your dome and get it,” he said presently. She seated herself. “It’s not thawed. I forgot to thaw it out. I just remembered now. I was going to take it out of the freezer this morning, but I had to finish some letters… maybe we could have something else and have the tacos tomorrow night.”
   “Okay,” he said.
   “And I meant to bring your tea back.”
   “I only gave you four bags,” he said.
   Eyeing him uncertainly, she said, “I thought you brought me that whole box of Celestial Seasonings Morning Thunder Tea. Then where did I get it? Maybe the food man brought it. I’m just going to sit here for a while. Could you turn on the TV?” He turned on the TV.
   “There’s a show I watch,” Rybus said. “I never miss it. I like shows about—well, I’ll have to fill you in on what’s happened so far if we’re going to watch.”
   “Could we not watch?” he said. “Her husband—”
   He thought, She’s completely crazy. She is dead. Her body has been healed, but it killed her mind.
   “I have to tell you something,” he said.
   “What is it?”
   “You’re—” He ceased.
   “I’m very lucky,” she said. “I beat the odds. You didn’t see me when I was at my worst. I didn’t want you to. From the chemo I was blind and paralyzed and deaf and then I started having seizures; I’ll be on a maintenance dose for years. But it’s okay? Don’t you think? Tobe on just a maintenance dose? I mean, it could be so much worse. Anyhow, her husband lost his job because he—”
   “Whose husband?” McVane said.
   “On the TV.” Reaching up she took hold of his hand. “Where do you want to go on our vacation? We so goddam well deserve some sort of reward. Both of us.”
   “Our reward,” he said, “is that you’re well.”
   She did not seem to be listening; her gaze was fastened on the TV. He saw, then, that she still wore her dark glasses. It made him think, then, of the song the Fox had sung on Christmas Day, for all the planets, the most tender, the most haunting song which she had adapted from John Dowland’s lute books.


“When the poor cripple by the pool did lie
Full many years in misery and pain,
No sooner he on Christ had set his eye,
But he was well, and comfort came again.”


   Rybus Rommey was saying, “—it was a high-paying job but everyone was conspiring against him; you know how it is in an office. I worked in an office once where—” Pausing, she said, “Could you heat some water. I’d like to try a little coffee.”
   “Okay,” he said, and turned on the burner.

Strange Memories of Death

   I woke up this morning and felt the chill of October in the apartment, as if the seasons understood the calendar. What had I dreamed? Vain thoughts of a woman I had loved. Something depressed me. I took a mental audit. Everything was, in fact, fine; this would be a good month. But I felt the chill.
   Oh Christ, I thought. Today is the day they evict the Lysol Lady.
   Nobody likes the Lysol Lady. She is insane. No one has ever heard her say a word and she won’t look at you. Sometimes when you are descending the stairs she is coming up and she turns wordlessly around and retreats and uses the elevator instead. Everybody can smell the Lysol she uses. Magical horrors contaminate her apartment, apparently, so she uses Lysol. God damn! As I fix coffee, I think, Maybe the owners have already evicted her, at dawn, while I still slept. While I was having vain dreams about a woman I loved who dumped me. Of course. I was dreaming about the hateful Lysol Lady and the authorities coming to her door at five A.M. The new owners are a huge firm of real estate developers. They’d do it at dawn.
   The Lysol Lady hides in her apartment and knows that October is here, October first is here, and they are going to bust in and throw her and her stuff out in the street. Now is she going to speak? I imagine her pressed against the wall in silence. However, it is not as simple as that. Al Newcum, the sales representative of South Orange Investments, has told me that the Lysol Lady went to Legal Aid. This is bad news because it screws up our doing anything for her. She is crazy but not crazy enough. If it could be proved that she did not understand the situation, a team from Orange County Mental Health could come in as her advocates and explain to South Orange Investments that you cannot legally evict a person with diminished capacity. Why the hell did she get it together to go to Legal Aid?
   The time is nine A.M. I can go downstairs to the sales office and ask Al Newcum if they’ve evicted the Lysol Lady yet, or if she is in her apartment, hiding in silence, waiting. They are evicting her because the building, made up of fifty-six units, has been converted to condominiums. Virtually everyone has moved since we were all legally notified four months ago. You have one hundred and twenty days to leave or buy your apartment and South Orange Investments will pay two hundred dollars of your moving costs. This is the law. You also have first-refusal rights on your rental unit. I am buying mine. I am staying. For fifty-two thousand dollars, I get to be around when they evict the Lysol lady who is crazy and doesn’t have fifty-two thousand dollars. Now I wish I had moved.
   Going downstairs to the newspaper vending machine, I buy today’s Los Angeles Times. A girl who shot up a schoolyard of children “because she didn’t like Mondays” is pleading guilty. She will soon get probation. She took a gun and shot schoolchildren because, in effect, she had nothing else to do. Well, today is Monday; she is in court on a Monday, the day she hates. Is there no limit to madness? I wonder about myself. First of all, I doubt if my apartment is worth fifty-two thousand dollars. I am staying because I am both afraid to move—afraid of something new, of change—and because I am lazy. No, that isn’t it. I like this building and I live near friends and near stores that mean something to me. I’ve been here three and a half years. It is a good, solid building, with security gates and dead-bolt locks. I have two cats and they like the enclosed patio; they can go outside and be safe from dogs. Probably I am thought of as the Cat Man. So everyone has moved out, but the Lysol Lady and the Cat Man stay on.
   What bothers me is that I know the only thing separating me from the Lysol Lady, who is crazy, is the money in my savings account. Money is the official seal of sanity. The Lysol Lady, perhaps, is afraid to move. She is like me. She just wants to stay where she has stayed for several years, doing what she’s been doing. She uses the laundry machines a lot, washing and spin-drying her clothes again and again. This is where I encounter her: I am coming into the laundry room and she is there at the machines to be sure no one steals her laundry. Why won’t she look at you? Keeping her face turned away… what purpose is served? I sense hate. She hates every other human being. But now consider her situation; those she hates are going to close in on her. What fear she must feel! She gazes about in her apartment, waiting for the knock on the door; she watches the clock and understands!
   To the north of us, in Los Angeles, the conversion of rental units to condominiums has been effectively blocked by the city council. Those who rent won out. This is a great victory, but it does not help the Lysol Lady. This is Orange County. Money rules. The very poor live to the east of me: the Mexicans in their Barrio. Sometimes when our security gates open to admit cars, the Chicano women run in with baskets of dirty laundry; they want to use our machines, having none of their own. The people who lived here in the building resented this. When you have even a little money—money enough to live in a modern, full-security, all-electric building—you resent a great deal.
   Well, I have to find out if the Lysol Lady has been evicted yet. There is no way to tell by looking at her window; the drapes are always shut. So I go downstairs to the sales office to see Al. However, Al is not there; the office is locked. Then I remember that Al flew to Sacramento on the weekend to get some crucial legal papers that the state lost. He hasn’t returned. If the Lysol Lady wasn’t crazy, I could knock on her door and talk to her; I could find out that way. But this is precisely the locus of the tragedy; any knock will frighten her. This is her condition. This is the illness itself. So I stand by the fountain that the developers have constructed, and I admire the planter boxes of flowers which they have had brought in… they have really made the building look good. It formerly looked like a prison. Now it has become a garden. The developers put a great deal of money into painting and landscaping and, in fact, rebuilding the whole entrance. Water and flowers and french doors… and the Lysol Lady silent in her apartment, waiting for the knock.
   Perhaps I could tape a note to the Lysol Lady’s door. It could read:


   Madam, I am sympathetic to your position and would like to assist you. If you wish me to assist you, I live upstairs in apartment C-1.


   How would I sign it? Fellow loony, maybe. Fellow loony with fifty-two thousand dollars who is here legally whereas you are, in the eyes of the law, a squatter. As of midnight last night. Although the day before, it was as much your apartment as mine is mine.
   I go back upstairs to my apartment with the idea of writing a letter to the woman I once loved and last night dreamed about. All sorts of phrases pass through my mind. I will recreate the vanished relationship with one letter. Such is the power of my words.
   What crap. She is gone forever. I don’t even have her current address. Laboriously, I could track her down through mutual friends, and then say what?


   My darling, I have finally come to my senses. I realize the full extent of my indebtedness to you. Considering the short time we were together, you did more for me then anyone else in my life. It is evident to me that I have made a disastrous error. Could we have dinner together?


   As I repeat this hyperbole in my mind, the thought comes to me that it would be horrible but funny if I wrote that letter and then by mistake or design taped it to the Lysol Lady’s door. How would she react! Jesus Christ! It would kill her or cure her! Meanwhile, I could write my departed loved one, die ferne Geliebte, as follows:


   Madam, you are totally nuts. Everyone within miles is aware of it. Your problem is of your own making. Ship up, shape out, get your act together, borrow some money, hire a better lawyer, buy a gun, shoot up a schoolyard. If I can assist you, I live in apartment C-1.


   Maybe the plight of the Lysol Lady is funny and I am too depressed by the coming of autumn to realize it. Maybe there will be some good mail today; after all, yesterday was a mail holiday. I will get two days’ of mail today. That will cheer me up. What, in fact, is going on is that I am feeling sorry for myself; today is Monday and, like the girl in court pleading guilty, I hate Mondays.
   Brenda Spenser pleaded guilty to the charge of shooting eleven people, two of whom died. She is seventeen years old, small and very pretty, with red hair; she wears glasses and looks like a child, like one of those she shot. The thought enters my mind that perhaps the Lysol Lady has a gun in her apartment, a thought that should have come to me a long time ago. Perhaps South Orange Investments thought of it. Perhaps this is why Al Newcum’s office is locked up today; he is not in Sacramento but in hiding. Although of course he could be in hiding in Sacramento, accomplishing two things at once.
   An excellent therapist I once knew made the point that in almost all cases of a criminal psychotic acting-out there was an easier alternative that the disturbed person overlooked. Brenda Spenser, for instance, could have walked to the local supermarket and bought a carton of chocolate milk instead of shooting eleven people, most of them children. The psychotic person actually chooses the more difficult path; he forces his will uphill. It is not true that he takes the line of least resistance, but he thinks he does. There, precisely, lies his error. The basis of psychosis, in a nutshell, is the chronic inability to see the easy way out. All the behavior, all that constitutes psychotic activity and the psychotic lifestyle, stems from this perceptual flaw.
   Sitting in isolation and silence in her antiseptic apartment, waiting for the inexorable knock on the door, the Lysol Lady has contrived to put herself in the most difficult circumstances possible. What was easy was made hard. What was hard was transmuted, finally, into the impossible, and there the psychotic lifestyle ends: when the impossible closes in and there are no options at all, even difficult ones. That is the rest of the definition of psychosis: At the end there lies a dead end. And, at that point, the psychotic person freezes. If you have ever seen it happen—well, it is an amazing sight. The person congeals like a motor that has seized. It occurs suddenly. One moment the person is in motion—the pistons are going up and down frantically—and then it’s an inert block. That is because the path has run out for that person, the path he probably got onto years before. It is kinetic death. “Place there is none,” St. Augustine wrote. “We go backward and forward, and there is no place.” And then the cessation comes and there is only place.
   The spot where the Lysol Lady had trapped herself was her own apartment, but it was no longer her own apartment. She had found a place at which to psychologically die and then South Orange Investments had taken it away from her. They had robbed her of her own grave.
   What I can’t get out of my mind is the notion that my fate is tied to that of the Lysol Lady. A fiscal entry in the computer at Mutual Savings divides us and it is a mythical division; it is real only so long as people such as South Orange Investments—specifically South Orange Investments—are willing to agree that it is real. It seems to me to be nothing more than a social convention, such as wearing matching socks. In another way it’s like the value of gold. The value of gold is what people agree on, which is like a game played by children: “Let’s agree that that tree is third base.” Suppose my television set worked because my friends and I agreed that it worked. We could sit before a blank screen forever that way. In that case, it could be said that the Lysol Lady’s failure lay in not having entered into a compact with the rest of us, a consensus. Underlying everything else there is this unwritten contract to which the Lysol Lady is not a party. But I am amazed to think that the failure to enter into an agreement palpably childish and irrational leads inevitably to kinetic death, total stoppage of the organism.
   Argued this way, one could say that the Lysol Lady had failed to be a child. She was too adult. She couldn’t or wouldn’t play a game. The element which had taken over her life was the element of the grim. She never smiled. None had ever seen her do anything but glower in a vague, undirected way.
   Perhaps, then, she played a grimmer game rather than no game; perhaps her game was one of combat, in which case she now had what she wanted, even though she was losing. It was at least a situation she understood. South Orange Investments had entered the Lysol Lady’s world. Perhaps being a squatter rather than a tenant was satisfying to her. Maybe we all secretly will everything that happens to us. In that case, does the psychotic person will his own ultimate kinetic death, his own dead end path? Does he play to lose?
   I didn’t see Al Newcum that day, but I did see him the next day; he had returned from Sacramento and opened up his office.
   “Is the woman in B-15 still there?” I asked him. “Or did you evict her?”
   “Mrs. Archer?” Newcum said. “Oh, the other morning she moved out; she’s gone. The Santa Ana Housing Authority found her a place over on Bristol.” He leaned back in his swivel chair and crossed his legs; his slacks, as always, were sharply creased. “She went to them a couple of weeks ago.”
   “An apartment she can afford?” I said.
   “They picked up the bill. They’re paying her rent; she talked them into it. She’s a hardship case.”
   “Christ,” I said, “I wish someone would pay my rent.”
   “You’re not paying rent,” Newcum said. “You’re buying your apartment.”